Updated 19 October 2026

David Attenborough’s encounter with mountain gorillas in the BBC series Life on Earth, broadcast in 1979, is one of the most famous scenes in wildlife television. Filmed in Rwanda’s Virunga volcanoes at Dian Fossey’s Karisoke study site, it shows young gorillas climbing over him as he whispers to the camera about how much meaning there is in exchanging a glance with a gorilla. The scene changed how millions of viewers saw gorillas, as gentle, intelligent relatives rather than monsters, at a time when only about 250 mountain gorillas were left in the Virungas.

How the scene was filmed

Life on Earth was an ambitious series about the history of life, and the gorilla sequence was planned to illustrate communication in primates. Dian Fossey agreed to let the BBC team film one of the gorilla groups she had habituated at Karisoke. Attenborough had planned to speak to camera near the gorillas, but the young animals approached, sat with him and played with him, and he spoke quietly while lying among them. The unscripted moment became one of the defining scenes of the series. Read about Dian Fossey and Karisoke.

Why it mattered

Before the late 1970s, gorillas were often portrayed as aggressive beasts, an image shaped by films such as King Kong and by hunters’ tales. Attenborough’s quiet, intimate footage, reaching a huge international audience, showed gorillas as calm, social animals with family lives viewers could relate to. It helped build public support for protecting them at a time when poaching and habitat loss threatened their survival. In the same period, conservation groups launched the Mountain Gorilla Project in Rwanda, which combined anti-poaching, education and controlled tourism, an approach that later spread to Uganda.

From television to gorilla tourism

Seeing gorillas on screen made people want to see them in the wild, and carefully managed gorilla tourism grew from the late 1970s in Rwanda and from 1993 in Uganda, when Bwindi’s Mubare family was opened to visitors. Permit income now pays for rangers and monitoring and shares money with communities around the parks. Mountain gorillas have grown to at least 1,063, and in 2018 they were moved from Critically Endangered to Endangered. See our guide to how tourism helped save mountain gorillas.

Attenborough’s wider advocacy

Across a career of more than seven decades, Attenborough returned many times to great apes and to the threats facing wildlife, and has supported conservation organisations working with primates. His later documentaries increasingly focused on habitat loss and climate change, threats that also affect gorillas. See our guide to climate change and mountain gorillas.

Seeing gorillas yourself

Attenborough’s encounter happened in the Virungas, today shared by Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, Uganda’s Mgahinga Gorilla National Park and Congo’s Virunga National Park. Uganda’s other gorilla park, Bwindi, has its own separate population, almost half of all mountain gorillas. Visitors keep at least 7 m away and spend one hour with a habituated family. A Uganda permit costs US$800, or US$600 in April, May and November; see our guide to the Uganda gorilla permit.

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