The Ranger Who Has Tracked Gorillas for 23 Years: His Story

Moses Tumwebaze has spent 23 years tracking mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park — navigating the same forest in every season, reading signs left by gorilla families that move through ranges they have held for generations. His story represents the human backbone of Uganda’s gorilla conservation success, the part rarely visible in travel brochures. Ranger knowledge like his is what makes the Bwindi trekking experience reliable, and it is why the permit system funds daily monitoring, not just tourism access.

The ranger who has tracked gorillas for 23 years does not describe his work as extraordinary. He describes it as daily, which is not the same thing. Moses Tumwebaze has been entering Bwindi Impenetrable Forest before dawn every morning for two decades, tracking the movements of mountain gorilla families through terrain that would defeat most people in an hour, and returning in the afternoon to his family in the village below the park boundary. He has seen things that no documentary has captured. He has been charged by silverbacks six times. He has watched infants grow into adults. He has outlasted poachers, disease outbreaks, and budget cuts. This is his story.

Before the Forest: Becoming a Tracker

Moses grew up in Buhoma, the small community at the northern edge of Bwindi. His father was a subsistence farmer who had mixed feelings about the park — the gorillas ate crops when they ventured near the boundary, a problem that was managed but never fully solved. Moses’s relationship with the forest was complicated in the way the relationships of border communities with protected areas often are.

He was nineteen when he applied to become a Uganda Wildlife Authority ranger. The selection process was competitive. There were written tests, physical assessments, and an interview. He was selected as a trainee tracker in 2002.

The Training

Tracker training at Bwindi is not classroom learning. It is forest learning — how to read tracks, how to identify the feeding signs of different gorilla individuals, how to move through dense vegetation without announcing yourself to every animal in a quarter-mile radius. Moses describes his first year as “learning how to see.”

“The forest looks like forest,” he says. “But once you learn, it is like a language. Everything is saying something. You just have to learn to read.”

The First Habituation: A Long Process

Moses arrived at Bwindi when the habituation of several gorilla families was still ongoing. Habituation — the process of accustoming wild gorillas to human presence so they can be safely visited by tourists — takes two to three years of daily contact. Rangers approach the gorillas without food offerings, using a set of established behaviours that signal non-aggression. It is slow, occasionally dangerous work.

“In the beginning, they run,” Moses explains. “The silverback runs, the females run, everyone runs. Then after some months, they look and run. Then they look and stay. Then they start to feed while you are there. That is when you know you are getting somewhere.”

The Silverback Who Charged Him Six Times

One of Bwindi’s silverbacks — Moses will not give his name in this context, saying only that the animal is now habituated and settled — charged Moses six times during the habituation process. A gorilla charge is not the same as a charge from a predator. It is usually a display: a declaration of dominance and a test of nerve. The correct response is to stand your ground, look away from the animal, and make yourself small. Running triggers pursuit.

“The first time, I ran,” Moses says, without apparent embarrassment. “My supervisor told me: if you run, you die. Not because the gorilla will kill you — they usually stop. But because you reinforce the behaviour. The second time, I stood. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.”

He stood the next five times as well. The silverback eventually stopped charging and began, gradually, to accept Moses’s presence. The family is now open to tourist visits and is one of the most sought-after family groups in the park.

Twenty-Three Years of Changes

Moses has watched the gorilla population at Bwindi grow significantly over his career. When he started, there were approximately 650 mountain gorillas across the entire range (Bwindi and the Virunga massif). Today there are over 1,100. He attributes this to three things: the habituation program bringing tourist revenue to fund conservation, the veterinary intervention program that treats injured and sick animals, and the community programs that give local people economic reasons to protect the forest.

The Infants He Has Known

Moses has watched specific gorillas grow from infants to adults over his career. He names them, describes their personalities, recalls the weeks of their births and the deaths of family members. One infant who was born in his second year as a tracker is now a fully adult female with infants of her own that Moses has also watched grow. He does not use the word “family” to describe the gorillas. But he describes them in a way that makes the word unnecessary.

The Losses

Not all gorillas in Moses’s care have survived. Disease has claimed some — the 2009 respiratory disease outbreak that killed multiple gorillas across Bwindi is a period Moses describes briefly and then falls silent. Poaching has claimed others, though the rates have dropped dramatically since the early days of his career. One silverback died from injuries sustained in a fight with a rival male. Moses documented the death and filed the report. He does not say how he felt about it, but he pauses for a long time before moving to the next part of his account.

A Typical Day

Moses wakes before five in the morning. He eats, walks to the park entrance, and meets his fellow trackers. They enter the forest at first light — always, without exception, before tourist groups arrive.

The goal of the morning tracking session is to locate the gorilla family and radio its position to the guide who will lead tourists to it later. This means covering ground quickly and quietly in terrain that is genuinely difficult. Moses describes sections of the forest where the undergrowth is so dense that progress is measured in minutes per metre.

When the Gorillas Are Not Where They Should Be

“Gorillas move,” Moses says simply. “Sometimes they are where you expect. Sometimes you search for three hours.” On the mornings when the family cannot be located immediately, Moses and his team spread out in a search pattern, using call-and-response signals, listening for the sounds of movement and feeding, reading the forest for evidence of which direction the group has travelled.

Tourist groups are never sent into the forest until the family has been located. This means, occasionally, that groups wait at the trailhead for an extra hour while trackers complete their work. Moses does not apologise for this. “Better to wait one hour than to walk four hours and find nothing,” he says.

What Twenty-Three Years Has Given Him

I ask Moses what has changed in him over two decades of this work. He thinks about this question for a long time — long enough that I begin to wonder if he has chosen not to answer.

“Patience,” he says finally. “The forest teaches patience. The gorillas teach patience. You cannot rush them. You cannot make them go where you want. You can only follow, and wait, and be present. When you learn that from gorillas, you start to live your whole life differently.”

He also describes a quality he calls “forest sense” — an awareness of the environment built over years of daily immersion that now operates below consciousness. “In the forest, I know where I am. I know what I am hearing. I know when something has changed. I cannot explain this. It is just in me now.”

Why Gorilla Trekking Matters to Him

Moses is not sentimental about the tourism aspect of his work, but he is clear about why it matters. “The permits bring money. The money pays my salary and my colleagues’ salaries. The money pays for the anti-poaching patrols. Without the tourists, there is no money. Without the money, there are no gorillas.”

He is also clear about what tourism does that money cannot. “When a tourist stands next to a gorilla and cries — this happens often — they go home and they tell people. They give to conservation. They vote for politicians who care about forests. They teach their children. One person who sees a gorilla becomes someone who protects gorillas for the rest of their life. That is worth more than any amount of money.”

Visiting Bwindi: What Guides Like Moses Want You to Know

Moses has one request for visitors: respect the rules. Stay at the required distance. Do not make eye contact with the silverback. Do not run. Follow the guide’s instructions exactly. “The rules are not bureaucracy,” he says. “The rules are how the gorillas stay habituated and how you stay safe. They are the same rules.”

For everything else — the forest, the gorillas, the experience of being in one of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth with some of the last remaining mountain gorillas — Moses trusts that visitors will take care of themselves. “You don’t need to be told why it matters,” he says. “When you are there, you know.”

Contact Uganda Gorilla Trekking to arrange your permit and meet the rangers and trackers who make this experience possible. Their work — 23 years and counting, before dawn every morning — is why the gorillas are still here.