For years, Belgian anti-poaching pilot Anthony Caere flew over Virunga’s forests and saw nothing but rebels below. No animals. Just armed insurgents in one of Africa’s most contested landscapes.
Now, for the first time in decades, the view has changed.
Virunga National Park — the oldest on the continent — spent years hollowed out by DR Congo’s violent insurgency, its elephant population poached to near silence. But something is shifting across that battered terrain, and the signs emerging from the forest floor suggest the recovery may be moving faster than anyone expected.
Thousands lost: how decades of insurgency emptied Virunga
Virunga National Park sits at the intersection of mountains, dense jungle, and contested borderlands in eastern DR Congo — terrain that has historically attracted more than wildlife. Armed rebel groups recognized the same geographic advantages that make the park remarkable, and for decades they operated freely within it. The result was catastrophic for the animals that once defined the landscape.
Thousands of African bush elephants once moved freely between Virunga and Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park, crossing borders the way large mammals do — without regard for human boundaries. Sustained poaching by insurgents, who hunted elephants to sustain themselves, steadily erased that population. For years, Caere flew over the park and saw only rebels. The elephants had gone quiet.
480 elephants cross back — and begin reengineering the landscape
The silence didn’t last. In recent years, 480 elephants from the Ugandan side have been documented crossing back into Virunga — a gradual return that accelerated as militia violence declined. Their presence is not merely symbolic. Elephants are ecosystem engineers, and a herd of that size reshapes a landscape with every step.
The transformation is already visible from the air. The elephants’ bulk and appetite are cutting trails through dense forest, clearing invasive shrubs, and expanding open areas — and the terrain is beginning to resemble a forested savannah again, a habitat type that supports a far broader range of species. Ground-level evidence backs that picture too: buffalo, Ugandan kob, warthogs, topi, and even a pair of lions have all been sighted in areas effectively emptied during the insurgency years.
Caere, who spent years flying over the park and seeing nothing but armed groups, now describes the pace of change as almost disorienting. “They’re restoring everything back to what it was 50 years ago and doing so much faster than we could have imagined,” he said. “If the elephants continue to stay here in these numbers, this place will look totally different in just a few years.”
Rare gorilla twins and a record birth season
The elephants aren’t the only measure of recovery. Virunga’s mountain gorillas — among the most closely monitored primates on earth — have shown encouraging signs in 2025 and into 2026, with nine healthy births recorded across the park’s gorilla families.
The most striking came from the Bageni family, the largest gorilla group in the park at 59 members. A female recently gave birth to twins — a rare event among gorillas — who are now two months old and developing well. Their mother is managing the unusual demands of raising two infants simultaneously, which Jacques Katutu, head of gorilla monitoring at Virunga, described as uncommon for the species.
Katutu was direct about what the birth season signals. “The five births recorded since the start of 2026, including twins in the Bageni family, are a very encouraging sign,” he said in a statement. He was careful to credit the community trackers present in the field every day, often under difficult conditions.
Behind the recovery: funding, anti-poaching efforts, and community programs
Wildlife doesn’t return to a park simply because the landscape is inviting. It returns when the conditions that drove it away are addressed — and at Virunga, that’s required sustained investment and deliberate effort on several fronts simultaneously.
The park has received millions in aid from organizations including Re:Wild, Global Wildlife Conservation, the European Union, and a fund established by actor Leonardo DiCaprio. That funding has supported anti-poaching operations and helped reduce the illegal hunting that once kept animal populations suppressed. Equally important are community development programs aimed at reducing the economic pressures that push people toward poaching, illegal agriculture, or militia recruitment.
For communities living in poverty on the edges of a conflict zone, conservation isn’t an abstract cause — it competes directly with immediate survival needs. Programs offering economic alternatives have been central to the gradual shift in security conditions. The reduction in militia activity, though, has been the essential precondition for everything else. Without it, no amount of funding or fieldwork would have been sufficient.
A fragile turning point for Africa’s most embattled park
What’s happening in Virunga is significant — but it would be a mistake to describe it as settled. The recovery is real and documented, yet it remains dependent on conditions that can change quickly.
The elephants’ return is particularly consequential because their ecosystem engineering compounds over time. The trails they cut, the shrubs they clear, the open areas they create — these changes make the habitat more hospitable for other species in ways that human intervention alone couldn’t replicate at the same scale or speed. If the herd stays, the landscape will keep transforming.
The convergence of returning megafauna and a strong gorilla birth season suggests the park may be approaching a broader ecological turning point. Whether that trajectory holds will depend on the region’s political and security dynamics in the years ahead. The animals are doing their part. The harder question is whether the conditions that allowed them to return can be sustained long enough to make the recovery stick.