Open Post: Two Small Heartbeats in the Mist

High in the cold, clouded forests of Virunga National Park, where the air thins and the trees feel ancient, a miracle happened. On January 3rd, community trackers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo spotted something rarely seen: twin baby boy mountain gorillas, both miraculously alive, both clinging to their mother in the high-altitude forest.

Their mother is twenty-two year old Mafuko. She is strong, experienced, and a tenacious survivor. This is the 8th time she has given birth, so she knows what it will take, but her task will not be easy. Her family, the Bageni, is the largest gorilla group in Africa’s oldest national park, a living lineage of sixty-nine bonded lives with memories and instincts moving together through the mountains.

What makes this so special is that less than one percent of recorded gorilla births will result in twins, and their survival is never guaranteed. The first four weeks are everything for these fragile babies. It determines if they have a chance. It dramatically increases the odds for survival.

For mountain gorillas, motherhood is solitary work. There is no shared feeding, no communal carrying, no rotation of care. The mother does everything alone. It is a challenge even when there is only one, but it is an almost impossible uphill battle to nurture two. Mafuko must carry both infants, protect both infants, feed both infants, and keep them alive in an environment where cold, terrain, predators, disease, and exhaustion are overwhelming. The threats are constant and unyielding.

At first, the babies are too weak to cling properly. Their bodies are too small; their grip hasn’t developed fully, so Mafuko must support them with her arms while walking, balancing her own weight, navigating forest paths, and keeping up with the group. She must produce enough milk for two growing bodies, an enormous task that requires tremendous amounts of energy. Every step costs her more. Every movement requires more strength.

And yet, so far, she has been successful. Observers say she is loving and attentive, and appears to be determined to keep her babies alive.  Perhaps because this isn’t her first time giving birth to twins. In 2016, she had twins, but they did not survive past a few days. That grief lives within her, whether we name it or not. Mountain gorilla mothers display profound grief when their infants die. They may carry their baby’s body for weeks, suffering and mourning. Deep depression is not uncommon. This despair will ripple through the group as they struggle to come to terms with loss and death.

Park officials are monitoring Mafuko and her babies very closely, which means extra protection, tracking, and care. The goal is simple: get them to the one-month mark. That is the threshold; after that, their chances rise. They become adaptable, stronger, and their survival becomes more likely. At four weeks, the babies will receive names. We are almost there, and as each day passes and the babies live, there is hope. It is cautious, but it is real. 

Two lives that shouldn’t easily exist inside a species that is still battling for its rightful place are a special kind of poetry about maternal labor and the quiet heroism of remarkable endurance and survival.

At this moment, somewhere in the cold green mist of Virunga, Mafuko is fighting to keep her babies alive in a world that still has not made enough space for them. Let us hope that she can persevere, that the tiny babies thrive, and that in a little over a week the twins receive their names. 

There are only about 1,075 mountain gorillas left in the wild, living across the high-altitude forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. Virunga National Park alone is home to roughly 350 of them. In the early 1980s, fewer than 250 existed worldwide, and extinction felt inevitable. War, poaching, deforestation, and human expansion had pushed them to the brink. 

It has taken decades of tireless conservation, protection, community tracking, and international effort to slowly bring the gorillas to their current numbers. In 2018, their status shifted from critically endangered to endangered. This is a quiet victory, but there is a lot of work to be done because the danger never really left.

Photo Credits: Virunga National Park/Reuters