Updated
How Far Do Gorillas Travel in a Day?. A mountain gorilla group usually travels less than a kilometre a day. In the Virunga volcanoes, groups often move only about half a kilometre; in Bwindi, where gorillas eat more fruit, they travel further on average and can cover 2–3 km on some days when trees are fruiting or another group is nearby. Distances of 5 km a day are not typical. Because the gorillas move slowly and sleep in a new place every night, trackers can find them each morning by following yesterday’s trail, which is why gorilla trekking works at all.
How Far Do Gorillas Travel in a Day? Mapping Their Forest Routes
Why gorillas move so little
Mountain gorillas live surrounded by their food. Their diet is mostly leaves, stems, shoots and pith from plants such as wild celery, nettles, vines and bamboo shoots, which grow densely across the forest floor and regrow quickly. A group can feed for hours in a small area and then move on a short distance to fresh plants. There is no need to cover long distances when the next meal is a few metres away, and saving energy matters for an animal that digests large amounts of low-quality food.
Fruit changes this. It is richer in energy but patchy: a fig or other fruiting tree may be some distance away and only in fruit for a few weeks. Bwindi’s gorillas live in a lower, more diverse forest than the Virunga groups and eat more fruit when it is available, so they tend to travel further each day and use larger areas. Our guide to what Bwindi’s gorillas eat covers the diet in more detail.
A gorilla family’s day
The day starts soon after first light, when the group leaves the nests it built the previous evening and begins feeding. Most travel happens during the morning and late-afternoon feeding periods, as the group moves slowly from one patch of food to the next. Around the middle of the day there is a long rest: adults doze or lie in day nests, mothers groom their young and juveniles play. In the late afternoon the group feeds again before each gorilla builds a new nest of bent branches and leaves on the ground or in a tree for the night.
Gorillas rarely reuse a nest, so every night’s sleeping site is a new point on the map. See our guide to how gorillas sleep and build nests.
Who decides where the group goes?
The dominant silverback largely sets the pace and direction. He decides when the group moves on from a rest and which way it heads, and the others follow him, though adult females can influence the choice too. Experienced silverbacks know their area well, including where seasonal foods appear at different times of the year. Our guide to gorilla social behaviour explains how the silverback leads the group.
Home ranges and meetings between groups
Over a year, a group uses a home range that can be a few square kilometres in the Virungas and considerably larger in Bwindi, often in the region of 10–40 km², depending on group size and how much fruit it eats. Mountain gorillas are not territorial in the strict sense: the ranges of neighbouring groups overlap and are not defended as fixed borders. Groups tend to keep apart, partly by hearing each other’s calls and chest beats from a distance.
When two groups do meet, the silverbacks usually display with hoots, chest beats and bluff charges, and the groups then separate. Some encounters become fights, especially if females could transfer between groups, and these can lead to serious injuries. A group pushed away after an encounter may travel much further than usual that day, which can mean a longer trek for visitors.
How trackers find the gorillas each morning
Each habituated family is followed every day by a team of trackers. In the morning they go to the place where they left the gorillas the previous evening, find the night nests and follow the fresh trail of broken stems, dung and flattened vegetation until they reach the group. They then radio its location to the ranger guiding the tourists. Because the group has usually moved only a short distance from its nests, the trackers rarely need more than a few hours to find it, even in steep and dense forest.
Researchers, including those at the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation at Ruhija in Bwindi, also record where groups go over the years. That record shows how the gorillas use the forest, where they leave the park to raid crops in neighbouring farms, and where patrols are needed against snares. See our guide to research in gorilla conservation.
What this means for your trek
How long you walk depends on where your family happens to be on the morning of your trek, not on how far it moved that day. Some families often stay close to the forest edge and are reached in an hour or less; others range deep in the hills, and a trek can take five or six hours each way. Group movements also explain why treks vary from one day to the next for the same family.
Rangers take fitness into account when assigning families at the briefing, so tell them if you need a shorter walk. Our guide to Bwindi’s gorilla families lists the groups by sector.
Once you reach the gorillas, you spend one hour with them, and during that time the group may keep feeding and moving slowly through the vegetation. Be ready to follow the ranger a short way through thick undergrowth. A permit costs US$800, or US$600 in April, May and November.
Frequently asked questions
Usually less than 1 km. Virunga groups often move about half a kilometre; Bwindi groups travel further on average and occasionally 2–3 km.
They eat more fruit, which is scattered and seasonal, so they move between fruiting trees more often.
No. Each gorilla builds a new nest every evening, usually close to where the group stopped feeding.
Not strictly. Neighbouring groups have overlapping home ranges and mostly avoid each other, although meetings can lead to displays or fights.
