![]() A further two groups are in the process of being habituated for the same purpose. There is currently one habituated gorilla group visited by a maximum of 3 tourists at a time (although two tourist groups may visit the gorillas per day). In contrast to mountain gorilla tourism, this program is still run on a relatively small scale. Following 4 years of intensive habituation efforts, the program was opened to tourists in 2002. The Bai Hokou gorilla tourism program was established in 1998 as part of the Dzanga-Sangha Project: an integrated conservation and development project, run in partnership between the Central African Republic government, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ). We focus on the impact of visitor number, distance and type (tourist/film crew/researcher/tracker) on the short-term behavioural responses of a western lowland gorilla group at Bai Hokou, Central African Republic. This preliminary study is the first to evaluate the impact of such visits on western lowland gorilla behaviour. The difficulty in habituating western lowland gorillas to human presence has limited the number of sites, restricting tourist and film crew visits to a handful of gorilla groups. ![]() Following the widely perceived success of mountain gorilla tourism, there has been increasing interest in developing tourism based on the observation of western lowland gorillas.
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