Photo of mountain gorilla, Ingo Arndt
After three hours of hiking through dense rainforest in the misty mountains of Rwanda, photographer Ingo Arndt set up at the edge of a clearing. Nearby, a few female gorillas and their babies were milling about, and Arndt was snapping away.
“Suddenly, less than three meters away from me, the vegetation moved and the face of the giant silverback appeared,” Arndt remembers. “We looked each other in the eyes for a few seconds—what mountain gorillas usually avoid.”
Mature male mountain gorillas can weigh more than 350 pounds, and while generally peaceful, it’s clear the animals are capable of great strength at a moment’s notice. “It was a very intimate moment,” Arndt says. “The world around me seemed to stop. I was just able to take two pictures before the clan leader turned and disappeared behind a bush.”
The feeling of being so close to such a powerful animal and near-human relative is something Arndt says he’ll never forget.
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Nat Geo photographers recall their favorite shots on Endangered Species Day
As part of a new project to highlight threatened species, photographers talk about the stories behind their most memorable shots.
A silverback gorilla rising out of the underbrush on a cloudy day. A tigress nursing her newborn cub at the mouth of a cave. An orangutan climbing a hundred feet into the forest canopy.
Most of us will never witness such rare moments, but we can experience them all the same, thanks to the perseverance of wildlife photographers. Some of these shots are the products of decades of experimentation, fine-tuning, and long hours spent in remote places getting eaten alive by flies, mosquitoes, and leeches.
So on the 15th annual Endangered Species Day, we reached out to some of our top wildlife photographers to see what scenes stuck with them through the years. Each is participating in a new project aimed at
