Conservationists in the Republic of Congo are celebrating another remarkable twist in the dramatic life story of a western lowland gorilla known as Lengui.
Having twice almost lost her life due to illegal snaring, Lengui has recently been caught on camera with a new baby. Believed to have been born on Valentine’s Day, the young baby appears to be in good health.
In 1994, Lengui’s mother was caught in a snare, leaving Lengui, just 18 months old at the time, helpless and alone - her mother would have been carrying Lengui on her back at the time of being caught in the snare.
Too small to eat or to sell as smoked meat, Lengui’s captors assumed they could get some money for her, so she was tied to a stake and given fruit to keep her alive. When word spread to Odzala National Park, the management team at Ecofac, an EU-sponsored programme that was financing Odzala at the time, rescued her. Arriving at Ecofac’s base camp in Odzala, the baby gorilla was dirty and exhausted.
A week later, Lengui was transported to Brazzaville Gorilla Orphanage, run by The Aspinall Foundation. Despite being around 18 months old, she weighed only 5kg – less than half the expected weight of a healthy gorilla of that age. Lengui was rehabilitated, temporarily evacuated under fire during a period of civil war, and eventually reintroduced to the wild.
In 2002, eight years after Lengui’s mother had been caught in a snare, Lengui herself caught her hand in a snare. By sheer strength, she managed had to rip the snare from the ground but her efforts to remove it had only tightened the metal cable around her palm. When veterinary experts arrived, they found that the snare had cut through Lengui’s palm to the bone, leaving her fingers dead and the flesh rotten, with an infection that had spread to her wrist. To save her life, a vet amputated her arm below the elbow.
Despite being left one-handed, which reduces a gorilla’s ability to survive in the wild, Lengui was one of the first gorillas ever to be successfully returned to the wild, in 1996. Since then, Lengui has transferred to a different reintroduced silverback and successfully raised a daughter, later disappearing from sight for several years, most likely avoiding people, due to the harm humans had caused to her and her mother.
Direct observations of the reintroduced gorillas are very rare. But dozens of videos were collected in the Congo using a network of motion-sensor camera traps placed in the Lesio-Louna gorilla reserve, the first reserve ever to home a reintroduced gorilla population. It’s co-managed by the Ministry of Forest Economy for the Republic of Congo and The Aspinall Foundation.
Lengui appeared in a handful of videos, part of a small group led by a young silverback named Elonga. By the end of the year, Lengui looked like she was heavily pregnant. In April 2026, word was sent out that Lengui had been caught on camera again, this time on 21 February, with a newborn baby estimated at around one week old.
“This is such good news, in large part because Lengui has such a unique story, spanning three decades,” says Tony King, The Aspinall Foundation's reintroduction coordinator. “She is a particularly elusive gorilla, so any news about her is rare and always an unexpected pleasure.”
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Motherhood won’t be easy for Lengui, who is now over 30 years old. Gorilla babies are dependent on their mothers for three to four years. Time will tell whether Lengui succeeds a second time to raise her baby. But the new arrival is positive news.
“It was impossible to say what Lengui’s chances were at the beginning, as she is the only one-handed gorilla ever to have been released,” says King. “But we were very confident at the time of her release that she could survive and thrive.
"What we can say now is that Lengui’s story, and that of over 50 other gorillas that have been orphaned by the bush-meat trade and subsequently released in Congo and Gabon, demonstrates that gorilla rehabilitation and reintroduction can work, given long-term commitment to monitoring, protection and management. Her story provides hope to all orphan gorillas currently being illegally trafficked globally.”
Top image credit: The Aspinall Foundation
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