Everyone has their favourite photos, and this is a sentimental one of mine.

Nkuringo was an old silverback of the first mountain gorilla group we visited in 2008, the Nkuringo Group at South Bwindi in Uganda. There were sixteen in the group then, but the leadership belonged to another younger silverback called Safari.

Nkuringo was the last of the group we spent time with, of some fifteen minutes, and was stripping the vines of leaves, not much bothered by his visitors. He was very old and seemed to have an injury to his mouth which we later learned had obtained in a fight two years earlier, leaving him slightly paralysed and making it difficult to eat.

If anyone still thinks that gorillas have the persona of a 1933 style King Kong, then they’d soon be persuaded otherwise by this guy.

Sadly, Nkuringo died of natural causes in April 2008 aged forty-nine, just six weeks after our visit.

Taken using a Nikon D300 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 200mm, f/3.3, 1/125 and ISO 560.