Titus - The Gorilla King Natural World

High on the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda lives a lost tribe.

One of our closest living relatives,

the mountain gorilla.

This is a dangerous mountain and no more so than for one silverback,

known as Titus.

He's seen his close kin murdered.

He's been orphaned, abandoned by his mother.

He should have died.

But against all the odds, he managed to triumph.

For the first time, we can piece together his story and reveal how

his tribe have won such a cherished place in human hearts.

Titus is, for now,

King of the Mountain.

His life is a unique window into the world of the mountain gorilla.

VOLCANO ERUPTS

The mountain gorilla's story starts hundreds of thousands of years ago

when the volcanoes of the Eastern Congo erupted.

For the gorillas that lived there, it was time to flee or die.

Some of them found a new home, rising high into the clouds.

Freezing cold, battered daily by torrential rain,

generations of gorillas had to adapt.

The lowland gorillas changed.

They grew larger, strong enough to climb almost 4,000 metres

to the freezing summit of their new home.

Their coats grew thicker with hair up to six inches long.

Deprived of lowland forest fruits,

they learned how to harvest this strange world.

They became the kings of the Virungas.

Now humans climb the steep slopes daily,

heading towards the last survivors of the species.

THUNDER CLAPS

Each day starts with a search party.

Trackers, whose skills have been handed down from father to son,

leading researchers who follow in the footsteps

of those that have come before them.

At 3,000 metres, the air is so thin, it's hard to breathe.

Only by following the gorillas day after day can scientists

understand their subtle, slowly evolving relationships.

Now you can hear that they are feeding on the bamboo shoot.

You can hear this noise, crunch, crunch.

Yeah, yeah, they're just in this stretch of bamboo.

Italian, Veronica Vecellio, and Rwandan, Felix Ndagijimana

are on the trail of Titus,

the male silverback, whose leadership qualities are legendary.

He's 33 years old

and still ruling over 25 gorillas - an impressive feat.

Most silverbacks his age would have been deposed by now.

He has a distinctive orange brow,

and he rules with the cool, calm demeanour of an elder statesman.

Wise and powerful, he commands by his sheer presence.

He has ten females,

four males, six teenagers and four youngsters to look after.

There's another big silverback in the group, Kuryama.

Titus' second in command, he's a crucial ally.

Without powerful males like him,

Titus could not keep his group safe from outsiders.

He needs Kuryama,

but Kuryama could be aiming for his crown.

Everybody is here except Ugenda,

Kwiruka, Inziza, Fat and Imvune.

Felix and Veronica observe and record every minute

of what is happening around them.

Today they've walked in on a fight between Titus and Kuryama.

GORILLAS FIGHTING

If we're in the middle of a fight, can be dangerous also for us.

So it's better to keep us more aside as possible

so to leave them the space to do whatever they want to do.

He's going to beat him. He's going to kick his arse.

Recently, Felix and Veronica have

been witnessing outbursts of violence between Titus and Kuryama.

And it's rippling down through the group. Everyone is becoming edgy.

It's not what the researchers have come to expect

from the dignified Titus.

We always describe him as so calm and soppy

and now the first day that you arrive...

Normally, no, it's not so common.

Veronica and Felix may be witnessing the end of the king's great reign.

And if they are, all his subjects will be affected.

No-one has ever seen a take-over of such a large group.

And a battle for his crown could cause the females to leave

and send everything into chaos.

If this is the final challenge, it's the end of a remarkable era.

Titus' story is not just an insight

into the ebb and flow of gorilla life.

It is also a key to understanding

what is happening in Titus' life today.

His rule has been developed over a lifetime of experiences.

But to look into an animal's 30-year past, to watch the development

of a character year upon year, is very rare in wildlife research.

Except for here in the Virungas.

Titus is special in one other way.

There has been someone watching over him since the day he was born.

Veronica and Felix are the latest in a long relay of researchers

that stretches back to 1967.

It was from this small hut that Dian Fossey started a research program

that would become one of the most detailed studies

of a wild creature ever undertaken.

It was the group led by Titus' parents

that first allowed Dian into the gorillas' world.

She became close to them,

even naming them Bert and Flossie after her own uncle and aunt.

Dian told the world their intimate story...

..teaching us that gorillas are not monsters,

but social beings full of curiosity and affection.

From Dian's original notes all the way through

to the computerised observations that Veronica and Felix

are making today, there is a 40-year paper trail.

And hidden within all this science,

the story of Titus' extraordinary rise to power.

Sometimes there is no film of the saga,

but by piecing together moments from the record, we can reconstruct

the remarkable ups and downs of Titus' life...

..and start to understand how the king's future may unfold.

Titus' story starts in 1974, when Dian introduced

a young researcher named Kelly Stewart to the gorillas.

You can smell...

33 years later,

rereading her notes transports Kelly back to a moment on the mountain.

"Uncle Bert the silverback is within five metres of me,

"but obscured, hidden behind bushes.

"Cleo, who was Titus' sister..."

On that August afternoon in 1974, Kelly was to experience something

only a handful of people have ever seen.

"She gives a CB," which is a chest beat.

Turning over the pages

of her notebook, the scientific tone is suddenly transformed.

"Nine minutes later, Flossie is looking up at me.

"At 1.11, she moves and against her breast

"I see a tiny pink ear, just for a moment.

"A flash of tiny hands.

"I think, "No, it can't be".

""I think I am hallucinating."

"Then I see the baby on her nipple.

"I watch for three to four minutes.

"Yes! Flossie has a baby!"

Exclamation point, exclamation point.

That is how I felt. That is exactly how I felt.

"I see the little baby's head again.

"Oh, my caution, and oh, my dear sweet little lordship."

I really did feel like that, it was so tiny.

At the time, I was reading a book called 'Titus Groan'.

A very common phrase she used was, "Oh, my caution"

when she saw her baby. And that book was creeping into my writing.

And Titus was named after 'Titus Groan'.

And there's been someone watching over Titus ever since.

33 years later, the survival of his children

depends upon his skills as a protector.

His ability to fight off other males

is the difference between life and death for infants like this.

If an outsider takes over, he will kill them

in order to sire his own children.

A baby is very vulnerable, clinging to its mother

for the first five months, it will scarcely let go for a second.

Only at two years old do they have the emotional security

to start to develop the inclination and energy for mischief.

BABY GORILLAS SCREAM

Titus leads his group through his hidden world.

It spans two countries. Rwanda on this side of the mountain.

Democratic Republic of Congo on the other.

His lifetime knowledge of the plants

and the seasons are the key to his group's existence.

His kingdom stretches from alpine meadows of giant lobelias

down to valleys of dense bamboo.

It's an isolated world and many animals,

like the Virungas' golden monkeys, exist nowhere else.

At this time of year, Titus

joins them to cash in on the bamboo's new shoots.

Special skills are needed to keep a 400lb silverback

going on salad alone.

Salami-sized fingers fold thistles and nettles into neat

little packages to keep barbs and stings away from sensitive lips.

And when Titus finds a particularly

good slope to harvest, he will start to sing.

TITUS SINGS

And one-by-one, the entire group joins in.

A gorilla choir.

GORILLA NOISES

All the feeding has created a temporary truce between

Titus and Kuryama.

Today researchers never get as close to the gorillas as Dian used to.

The risk of gorillas catching human infections is too great.

The apes are too vulnerable.

Here is a nice moment.

Because there's Titus with Kuryama.

Now Titus is sleeping with Papoose, that is the mother of Kuryama.

It's a little family moment.

It's sweet.

Veronica understands Titus intimately.

Imitating the gorillas' vocalisation

and knowing when to avoid eye contact

is all part of becoming an ignored presence.

It's like following a complex soap opera

and understanding Titus' power as a leader is about

understanding the web of friendships that he's developed over years.

When Titus was young,

researchers were only just beginning to understand this.

Ian Redmond joined Dian in 1976, when Titus was two years old.

And he's always had a soft spot for Titus.

Titus is special to me because he was the first gorilla I ever saw.

And the reason I saw him first was as we were approaching this thicket,

a little black furry thing climbed up a tree and it was Titus

being chased by his younger brother, Kweli.

And in order to see the rest of the family,

we had to get back down on our hands and knees and

crawl under the thicket and we kind of emerged into this little glade.

And it was like joining a family picnic.

Ian came into Titus' life at a crucial moment.

A time when observations of the group would challenge

our assumptions about the way gorillas lived.

Adolescent males are called blackbacks

because they've not yet grown their distinctive saddle of silver hair.

We now know that young males in a group like this

are life-long friends or relations

and they will not tolerate an outsider.

To this day, it's considered almost impossible

for a young male to enter a group from the outside,

but it has happened once.

On 27th January 1976, a shabby looking blackback

just like this one ambled out of the forest unchallenged.

It had never been known for a male to join a group.

Usually females left the group to join another group,

and males left the group to find females.

So it was a great surprise when this individual

turned up in the group almost mature.

In fact Dian had a guest with her

that day and he asked her who that was and she said "Beats me!"

And Beetsme became the name of this

rather shabby looking shambling blackback.

A little bit older than the blackback already in the group, Tiger.

And Tiger and Beetsme used to play together, quite rough.

Chasing each other, thumping each other, wrestling

and you'd see them, "Argh, argh, argh, argh,"

laughing and chuckling, all in good nature but quite

heavy thumps by the look of it. And you'd see

Titus and Kweli watching this and you

can see role models in their minds, "I'm going to be doing that soon."

The young Titus struck up a bond with the stranger

right from the very start.

And as Titus faced the blackest period of his life, it was this

relationship with Beetsme that would be more crucial than any other.

GORILLA SCREAMS

Poaching is always a threat to gorillas.

The end of the '70s

was a terrible time for the study groups of Karisoke.

And in 1977, Titus lost his uncle. It was Digit, Dian's favourite.

This looks like a beautiful sunny glade.

But this path down here, on 3rd January 1978,

was the scene of what looked like a funeral cortege.

I saw men bringing, on their shoulders, not a coffin,

but two poles and strapped to those poles, the body of Digit.

His head and his hands had been cut off.

And he was brought down, and they then carried him round the bamboo

and to the front area where Dian came out of the cabin

and saw someone she'd known from infancy.

At that stage in my life, the worst thing that had happened to me.

It was like finding the body of a friend -

headless, handless, hacked about.

For Dian, the shock was even worse

because she had known him for so long. He was such a close friend.

It was obvious that he had died

defending the family from the poachers.

And Dian didn't burst into tears. There was no histrionics.

It was almost like a shutter went down behind her eyes

as she absorbed the impact of what had happened.

But Digit's death was just the beginning.

This man witnessed a traumatic event

that would alter the course of young Titus' life forever.

David Watts has followed Titus more than any other researcher.

But in 1978, David had only been on the mountain a few months

when he came upon some worrying signs in the forest.

I still vividly remember going out that morning. I was by myself.

What I saw was a trail of all of the rest of the gorillas,

who obviously had been moving fast and were upset by something.

And I started to follow that and saw what we called "fear dung",

bad diarrhoea, along the trail.

Then suddenly I saw a large black thing lying on the trail ahead,

and I quickly realised it was a gorilla

and then I knew it's a dead gorilla.

And then I found that it was Uncle Bert, who had

clearly stayed in the rear as the group fled and must have turned to

face the poachers and tried to drive them away. And they shot him.

Titus' father had been decapitated.

And there was worse to come

when the young Beetsme realised that all the silverbacks were gone.

Beetsme seemed to understand that Uncle Bert was gone.

He wasn't coming back.

And saw an opportunity now to try to make this his group.

He became extremely aggressive,

particularly to Flossie, Titus' mother.

And Flossie had this very young infant, Frito.

And he charged at Flossie, and Flossie went up

like this to try to fend him off and she had her infant in her arm.

And he hit the baby on the back.

Flossie carried her dead infant for two days.

It was Beetsme's bid to take over the group and it failed.

At the first opportunity, Flossie and Cleo, Titus's older sister, left.

So now Titus had quickly lost his father

and then his mother, and then his sister.

Titus' group disintegrated.

For a gorilla group without a silverback,

without reproductive females, it's over.

There is no family life.

So Titus lost that security of a normal upbringing as a young gorilla.

And found himself pretty much like a schoolboy

being thrown onto the streets of a big city and having to survive.

Titus was just four years old.

An orphan in the forest.

There was only one other gorilla to turn to.

And that was the beginning of this extraordinary relationship

between Titus and the blackback, Beetsme,

who killed his little sister.

While there are almost no images from the time

Titus spent with Beetsme, the notes tell a detailed story.

And it's an introduction to a whole new side of gorilla behaviour.

First it was just Beetsme and Titus,

but then they were joined by five other males.

The researchers had never witnessed a situation like it.

A new kind of group, all male.

They formed this bachelor group of about seven animals

that really stayed together, Titus, Beetsme

and a silverback, Peanuts, who were together for years.

They had a dominance hierarchy based on age.

And they occasionally would have this

odd sexual interactions going on that we never saw

in breeding groups where there was more than one male.

We didn't see the kind of homosexual behaviour

that occurred in this band of bachelors.

Yeah, there weren't any females around.

It stayed like this for eight years.

But in 1985, the death of a silverback in another group

meant that five females came to join the bachelors

and this brought everything to a head.

Six males could stay together so long as there were no females there.

But not when they now had females.

Titus found himself in the middle of a battle for supremacy.

Unlike when he killed Flossie's baby,

this time, Beetsme was a full sized silverback

and there was no doubting his power.

One by one he drove off the males

and killed two of the females' infants.

It was classic takeover tactics.

But in one respect, he behaved unexpectedly.

He allowed Titus, the potential young rival, to stay.

Maybe he needed his friend, Titus, to help keep his new group together.

But the arrangement backfired on Beetsme

because the dominant female, Papoose,

had designs on the handsome young Titus.

The only trouble was that after all this time in the wilderness,

Titus didn't quite know how to react.

He hasn't seen a female, essentially.

And doesn't quite know what he's supposed to do.

And a couple of times I saw her solicit meetings,

and he responded by mounting her.

But she had to then reach around behind her and try to

reposition him, and back into him,

so that he could figure out exactly what he was supposed to do.

Titus' affairs, behind Beetsme's back, offered a new researcher the

opportunity to compare the success of these two competing males.

The question then is, well, what's actually going on between

these males, and most importantly, who's actually siring the offspring?

For Martha Robbins, it was becoming clear that female preferences

have a huge influence over who gets to be a dad.

It makes you wonder, well,

what do females find attractive in silverbacks?

And it may be more than actually who's dominant.

There may be other characteristics.

Even to human observers,

Titus is known to have a strong symmetrical face.

A sign of fitness.

On a personal opinion, yes,

I would say Titus is more handsome than Beetsme.

No, I mean Titus is a handsome silverback.

You can get me on film saying that!

Whether Titus was more of a hunk than Beetsme is serious science.

But the only way to know who is fathering which babies

is a paternity test.

By extracting the DNA, the researchers were able

to start to map out the family tree of an individual.

But it would take 16 years before scientists

could unravel the extent of Titus' dynasty.

He was going behind Beetsme's back when he was 11.

Now he's 33, and he faces the same threat

with a young male like Kuryama.

Females align themselves to their leader,

openly soliciting mating from Titus, when they are in oestrus.

But they also like to confuse the other males into believing

that they may also be the father of their children.

So, secret liaisons with a silverback like Kuryama

are arranged out of sight of the king.

It's a clever strategy, but you don't want to get caught out.

No wonder Titus is stressed.

Biting a female is really out of character.

Ah, she has a bad wound.

She has a bad wound, here.

Upper eyes, and also in the back of the head.

For all those that study Titus, his calm, confident rule

has been his one overriding trait.

Today's display of violence is maybe another sign

that he's starting to lose his grip on power.

Kuryama can sense that his time is coming.

Posing, he displays his strength.

Titus pretends not to notice.

Felix and Veronica are recording a power shift.

What form the challenge for leadership will take

remains to be seen.

Footage of takeover battles is rare.

A male can be driven away for good,

or bitten so badly, he never recovers.

18 years ago, when Titus took over from Beetsme, he surprised

all the researchers by somehow orchestrating a bloodless coup.

Their bond of friendship won through, and Beetsme stood down.

After the challenge, after a lot of aggression, a lot of fighting,

after everything was sorted out, Titus was now the dominant male.

He was fully grown.

He was then 18 years old and in his prime, and impressive and strong.

Titus was the centre, and he was in charge.

It was 1991, and the king was crowned.

Given his unpromising start in life,

it was a truly remarkable achievement,

to create his own group.

Only 60% of the gorillas born on this mountain

even make it to adulthood.

Only a handful of survivors take over a group of their own.

After 17 difficult years, Titus had finally made it to the top.

But as he triumphed,

the world around him descended into the chaos of the Rwandan Civil War.

For decades, people had followed Titus

and the research gorillas of Karisoke,

but then the study had to stop.

It's the only gap in the record.

A terrible silence that stands testament

to the madness that overran the plains below.

900,000 people died in 100 days.

Even for those who studied them, day in and day out,

the gorillas could no longer be their first thought.

In April and May of 1994, I was, of course,

very concerned about the gorillas and what was happening.

But it made me think we have allowed the genocide

to happen in the first place.

And people are saying "Oh, the gorillas, the poor gorillas,

"what's happening to the gorillas?" And I, I really...

I have a hard time understanding that.

The war and instability lasted ten years.

Despite the violence, Rwandan Park staff

risked their lives to keep up with the gorillas.

But there was one 15-month period with no contact at all.

Just after the genocide,

Ian joined a Rwandan team to try to find the gorillas.

And the first group they came upon was Titus'.

Throughout all this turmoil, the gorillas had just been

going about their lives.

Obviously, avoiding the areas where different sides

were shooting at each other. And it was a tremendous sense of

relief to find that most of them had survived, and not only that.

Shortly before we'd arrived, a new baby had been born.

So, life was going on.

Titus did not just survive the war, his group had grown in number.

Stability has returned to Rwanda.

The National Park staff and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

are now protecting a population of 350 gorillas that is increasing.

And in Titus' story today,

the rangers are organising a search party.

Titus has moved so fast up the mountain,

he's left the humans behind.

They're concerned that he may have travelled into unprotected areas.

In the last year alone, ten dead gorillas have been

recovered on the other side of the volcanoes, in the Congo.

He's taken his group to the very top of his world.

At 3,700 metres, Mount Visoke is like another universe.

It's rare for the gorillas ever to enter the crater,

but for a moment, the lake seems to captivate them.

I don't know.

I always have the impression that they really are enjoying...

Because sometimes, they can stay also a few minutes

just looking to the lake.

And I like to think they are enjoying the view.

Since Dian Fossey first entered this world

and overturned the gorillas' fearsome reputation,

we've discovered that gorillas are highly intelligent social beings.

Characters that shape their own destinies.

Felix and Veronica are keen to keep up with the ongoing saga

of Titus and Kuryama.

The two silverbacks are still uneasy about each other.

Look how Kuryama is dominant.

Kuryama just approach him and they start to vocalise.

And actually, at the end, he took the place of Titus,

and Titus had to move away.

For Kuryama to displace Titus in this way may not seem like much

to us, but gorilla body language speaks volumes.

They can only come to the top of the mountain for a matter of days.

Temperatures can drop well below freezing.

And if they stay too long, the infants may die.

And Titus seems to be keeping them too long.

The group awaits a decision from their leader,

but just who is in charge is becoming less and less clear.

Tired of waiting, Kuryama takes his own lead, and the others follow.

The group has split.

Kuryama may be dismantling

one of the greatest groups of gorillas ever recorded.

Surrounded only by his most loyal subjects,

Titus sits on the top of his island world.

That night, Titus and his beleaguered band

head over the border, travelling deep into the Congo,

where the researchers cannot follow.

It's a few more missing pages in the record of his life.

Maybe the final chapter of his story will be lost to the jungle.

He's taught us what it takes to rule this mountain.

As this archive shows, he was a formidable silverback.

For a male gorilla, success is all about

passing your particular genetic code to as many offspring as possible.

And as the DNA results are analysed,

they reveal some startling discoveries.

It turns out that Titus conceived his first offspring

younger than any other known gorilla.

It was the result of his secret mating with Papoose.

He sired his first child right under Beetsme's nose, aged 11,

and that child was Kuryama.

Titus is being deposed by his own son.

Piecing together his family tree,

we can see the true extent of his dynasty.

He has sired more offspring than any other mountain gorilla on record.

His story has shown us what it takes to be a gorilla king.

It is much more about politics than brute force.

He's not just an ordinary gorilla.

He's one of the longest observed gorillas,

if not primate, or animal, in the world.

But at the same time, Titus embodies what we need to know about gorillas.

And what we need to understand to preserve this endangered species.

Titus is still capable of surprises.

23 days after disappearing into the Congo,

he's back.

And he has added one more to his recently depleted group.

Shangasa just had a little baby. You can see.

That means that she gave birth tonight, or this morning, very early.

Titus may no longer be in charge

of one of the largest groups on the mountain...

..but with no other silverbacks in the group,

the fate of this newcomer now rests solely in his hands.

The king must reign again.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd