World Gorilla Day
Next: September 24, 2027
Our quiet cousins in the mountains.
The story
Where it comes from
World Gorilla Day was launched on 24 September 2017 by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Karisoke Research Center that Fossey founded in Rwanda's Virunga mountains in 1967. It celebrates gorillas and the rangers and communities who protect them.
How it's celebrated
Zoos and conservation groups hold events and fundraisers; Rwanda's annual Kwita Izina ceremony, in which baby mountain gorillas are given names, falls nearby in the calendar. People are asked to recycle old phones, whose coltan is mined in gorilla habitat.
Did you know
- Mountain gorillas are the rare conservation success: numbers have risen from about 250 in the 1980s to over 1,000 today.
- Gorillas share around 98 per cent of their DNA with humans.
- Dian Fossey studied the gorillas for eighteen years and is buried at Karisoke beside the animals she knew.
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