Amid this confusion, Mushenzi was trying to pull his park back into order. Forty-eight years old, raised just outside the north end of the park, he was attracted to it from childhood. He studied agronomy at Lavanium University in Kinshasa and wildlife management at Garona College in Cameroon, then spent years as a field ranger before becoming provincial park director in 1995. His chief responsibility, Virunga, was established by the Belgian colonial government in 1925 specifically for mountain gorillas. More than half a century later, Dian Fossey made these animals famous with her book Gorillas in the Mist .
Mountain gorillas are exceedingly rare.
They live only in the upland forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo. There are two populations of roughly equal size. One is in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, where a recent census counted 292 gorillas. The second is in the Virunga Mountains, on the borders of all three countries. The last census, completed in 1989, estimated 324 gorillas in the Virungas, but war has prevented a re-count.