A former chief of the Nigeria Forest Service once told me that a boyhood fascination for R. M. Ballantyne's book The Gorilla Hunters was one important deciding factor in his choice of tropical forestry as a career. I cannot claim any such romantic incentive in the choice of a career but nonetheless when I found myself in charge of a territory containing the habitat of one of the few remaining gorilla colonies in the Commonwealth, I was more than interested at the prospect of visiting the area and possibly observing these animals in their haunts.