The Celebrated Moment When A Mountain Gorilla Was Seen Drinking Water

Unlike other wild animals across the world, mountain gorillas are known for not loving to drink water. You will hardly ever find a mountain gorilla on your Rwanda gorilla safari drinking water from lakes, rivers or streams; this is so because they get majority of the water in the bodies from the morning dew plus the food that they eat which is majorly comprised of leaves, fruits and shots.

To confirm this, Dian Fossey an International renowned gorilla researcher stated in her journals that these mountain gorillas have an aversion to for rain and in fact they could generally dislike water. She went on to note that when observed crossing streams within their habitat, they do so without getting the coats of far on their bodies wet. This also has been observed by several tourists while on safari in Rwanda as they track gorillas.

But considering the fact that mountain gorillas are wild animals and their behavior is not predictable, in 2013 Felix Kinani Jean a Rwanda Wildlife researcher came across gorillas in the Virunga massif drinking water during the rainy season. It turned out not only a great discovery to him but to the entire international community of those interested in wildlife especially mountain gorillas.

During his route visit to check on the health of the gorillas, Felix Kinani was busy tracking one of the 10 habituated gorilla groups – the Hirwa gorilla group on April 16^th 2013 when he came found silverback Munyinya Silverback together with some members of his family close to a stream using their hands to drink water. This was a very exceptional observation ever documented in the life of mountain gorillas which are known to acquire most of their body fluid from the vegetation that they feed on.

Researcher Felix Kinani found this group close to Rwebeya stream which flows across the floor of Volcanoes National Park and during the rainy months swells into a sizeable river that at times damages some of the farmlands and homestead near it. This very unique observation was actually the first of this kind to ever be documented in the life of mountain gorillas – one of the IUCN endangered animal species

Occasionally the infant gorillas are seen playing in shallow pools of water particularly during the dry months. They love seeing their reflections in the water may be at times imagining that they are looking at another gorilla; so you will see them making playful gestures or even trying to touch their own reflection. However this instance of seeing them drink water was an extremely rare one.

Today there are less than 900 mountain gorillas surviving on the entire planet and these can be seen in only two places which are in the Bwindi Impenetrable forest of Uganda, and the Virunga Massif that extends in Rwanda, Uganda and the DR. Congo. These offer a very favorable habitat for the mountain gorillas and millions and millions of tourists have traveled from different parts of the continent to see these beautiful amazing giants during the Gorilla tracking activity on their safari in Rwanda or Uganda.