Tourist treks helped save gorillas. What happens in lockdown?

It’s hard to imagine a wildlife encounter more intimate than what tourists experience in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Families of mountain gorillas saunter past visitors on their oversized knuckles, seemingly unconcerned by their human observers. Baby gorillas climb and tumble over their parents in the grass. Adults recline in the thick brush like men sprawled out for Sunday football on a La-Z-Boy recliner.

For visitors, gorilla treks are often a bucket list highlight, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get up close and personal with one of humanity’s closest relatives, with whom we share 98% of our genetic material. But the biggest value of tourism is to the gorillas themselves. Since treks began in