- Mwezi “Badru” Mugerwa is a Uganda-based ecologist and conservationist whose work is focused on biodiversity monitoring using camera traps in East Africa’s rainforests, and specifically the African golden cat.
- In 2013, Mugerwa started his conservation nonprofit called Embaka, the local Rukiga name for the golden cat, to work with hunting communities around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda.
- The organization provides alternative livelihoods to communities through various initiatives to steer them away from hunting and snaring in the national park, which has impacted golden cat numbers there.
- This year, Mugerwa is leading a pan-African monitoring program for the species to assess its distribution, population density and threats, with an eye to replicating Embaka’s activities in other countries.
It was mid-2008. Mwezi “Badru” Mugerwa was almost done with his bachelor’s degree in forestry, an academic field that had trained him to view forests as a resource for extraction. However, as he inched closer to graduation, the idea of cutting down trees didn’t sit well with him, and he was looking for ways to put his academic training to better use. In June, an internship opportunity in the remote forests of Bwindi came calling, and Mugerwa jumped at it. He didn’t know it then: but he had a date with Africa’s least-known feline.
For someone born and raised in Kampala, Uganda’s bustling capital city, life deep in the rainforest without electricity or piped water wasn’t on the cards. But the chance to protect forests instead of cutting them down was too good to be turned down. Two days after finishing his exams, Mugerwa packed his bags and set off on the day-long journey to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, about 500 kilometers (310 miles) away from home, on Uganda’s southwestern border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mugerwa reached the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation’s field station in the dead of the night.
“The only sound you could hear were insects, and the only light we had was from the stars,” he says. It was a total contrast to the noise- and light-drenched Kampala. The tranquility of Bwindi mesmerized him. “I was like, this is beautiful!”
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park got its name for a reason: it has no roads and is only accessible by foot. With dense, ancient tropical rainforest blanketing the steep hills and deep valleys, much of it sits at an elevation of about 2,000 meters (6,600 feet). The UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to half of the world’s mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), which share their habitat with black-and-white colobus monkeys (Colobus guereza), L’Hoest’s monkeys (Allochrocebus lhoesti), eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii), crowned hornbills (Tockus alboterminatus) and Rwenzori turacos (Gallirex johnstoni) among many other animals.
Drawn to its beauty and biodiversity, Mugerwa would go on to center his work around Bwindi for more than 15 years. No matter where else life has taken him, including master’s and doctorate degrees overseas, Bwindi’s rainforests and its inhabitants have come to define his life.
Enter embaka
After his internship at Bwindi, Mugerwa was asked to stay on and lead a long-term camera-trap monitoring program as part of the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network.
In mid-2010, when he was going through footage captured by the camera traps, a particular snap stood out. It was a black-and-white image of a cat-like creature that Mugerwa hadn’t seen before. The animal’s sturdy stature fascinated him and he fell for its visual charisma. “There was something drawing about it,” he recalls of his first encounter with the wildcat that would become his life’s purpose. “It was a turning point in my career.”
The camera had captured the African golden cat (Caracal aurata), Africa’s only forest-dependent cat, endemic to the continent’s west and central rainforests. About twice the size of a domestic cat, the African golden cat has a brown-to-black coat, short legs and large paws. Although it’s categorized as vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List, it’s one of the least studied cats in the world, as Mugerwa would soon find out.
Curious to know more, Mugerwa turned to his field assistants who had worked in the national park for decades. Much to his surprise, they said they’d never seen it before either. So he asked members of the communities living on the fringes of Bwindi if they might know more. They did, of course. They called it embaka in their native Rukiga tongue. But they didn’t know its name in English, the language in which any scientific record of that cat was likely to exist.
After consulting researchers who studied African cats, Mugerwa eventually figured out the mystery: it was the African golden cat. Although the species was known to science, there was barely any published literature on it. The cat was truly an enigma.
Mugerwa turned again to the local community members, many of whom hunted game in the forest. But their knowledge came from an unfortunate place: snare traps. The hunters told him they found the cats regularly in their snares, which they use to catch duikers, a group of antelopes native to sub-Saharan Africa about the same size as the golden cat. For them, the cat was an unwanted nuisance in their traps, and when they caught one, they usually left the carcass to rot in the forests because eating a carnivore was taboo. There were also anecdotal reports of the cats entering the surrounding villages and preying on chickens and baby goats.
“The lack of knowledge about the species and the fact that the hunters were confessing to catching this animal in their traps is what charted all the work that I have been doing for the last 15 years,” Mugerwa says. That started with a study to understand the ecology of the species, including its distribution, abundance and behavior — the “basic ecological questions.”
Tapping community knowledge
With a small grant from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, headed by the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mugerwa began monitoring the African golden cats in Bwindi. He found that, contrary to what the hunters had told him, the cat wasn’t very widespread, and in areas with snaring their estimated distribution dropped by half. The cats actively stayed away from common snaring areas, and avoided venturing out during the day when hunters were active. They also weren’t really that big a menace to livestock: only nine of the 300 families Mugerwa surveyed reported any harm from the cats.
“This was mind-blowing,” Mugerwa says. “There was clear evidence that hunting was impacting the species.” Now, to save the species, he had to turn again to the hunters. He had to understand why they hunted in a national park when law enforcement was strict and getting caught carried months of prison time.
Mugerwa surveyed the communities around Bwindi to understand their motivations behind hunting game in general, but specifically the golden cats. In the conversations that followed, he found that local hunters had killed 80 golden cats in their snares in just one year. Of those, 71 were unintentionally caught, what Mugerwa calls “collateral damage” from the indiscriminate snaring for duikers. The rest were caught for offerings to local chiefs, traditional rituals, and the purported medicinal benefits from the cat’s hide.
“That’s when we shifted the gear,” Mugerwa says. It didn’t take long for him to realize that to save Bwindi’s golden cats for the future, he had to move beyond just collecting data about the species and think about steering hunters away from the snares.
The birth of Embaka, the NGO
That idea inspired Embaka, the conservation nonprofit that Mugerwa set up in 2013 to bring together local communities on Bwindi’s periphery and provide them with livelihood alternatives. Aptly named after the golden cat, the organization rallied hunters toward conserving Africa’s only rainforest cat.
One of the first programs under Embaka was the Pig Seed Bank, where hunting households were given a pregnant sow on the condition that they donate one female piglet to a neighbor who promises to stop hunting.
“We called it [a] seed bank because it is not benefiting one hunter household, but many,” Mugerwa says. With a piggery in place, hunters now had access to meat without needing to trap it in the wild. To date, more than 100 pigs have been given to households under this initiative, Mugerwa says, reading the numbers from a detailed spreadsheet.
To address income needs, Embaka started Conservation Pesa (pesa is the Swahili word for money), a savings and loan co-op that provides seed capital to its members at very low interest rates. A part of the interest earned goes toward supporting conservation and building necessary amenities for communities, such as schools and drinking water taps. As of today, 452 members are part of Community Pesa, with access to money during times of needs.
Then, in 2021, the organization launched Smiles for Conservation, a program to bring free oral and dental care to communities’ doorsteps. In remote parts of Uganda, oral health care is often inaccessible and unaffordable. So Smiles for Conservation was a huge incentive for the locals to give up hunting in exchange for regular dental care. Mugerwa says the program has benefited nearly 800 people.
Embaka has touched the lives of 2,225 local families to date, according to Mugerwa, mobilizing them against bushmeat hunting and turning poachers into protectors.
“These numbers may sound like mere numbers, but for us, they are behavior changes,” Mugerwa says. He hopes the bridges he has built with the communities over the years can inspire them to contribute to the long-term monitoring of the African golden cats, a project he’s starting this year. The long-term data collected, he says, can finally answer the million-dollar question: “We know we are able to keep hunters out of the national parks, but is it helping the species?”
A pan-African effort to conserve golden cats
Across its range, the golden cat faces many threats, including snaring, game hunting and deforestation. As an extensive road network — nearly 36,000 km (22,300 mi) according to a recent study — slices through the Congo Basin, it leaves large swaths of forests accessible to logging and game hunting. The increase in mining and oil palm plantation operations across the Congo Basin also threatens golden cats, and many other species, underscoring the need for pan-African monitoring of the species.
That’s the aim of the African Golden Cat Conservation Alliance and Working Group (AGCCA & WG), a pan-African effort spearheaded by Mugerwa’s Embaka, to fill in the ecological knowledge gaps across the species’ entire range. The group, active in 19 countries with 38 conservation partners, plans to start a standardized camera-trap grid across 22 countries where African golden cats are thought to live, to monitor their population, distribution and abundance. In addition, many of Embaka’s community-focused initiatives are being replicated in some of these countries. “Hopefully, in five years, we’ll be able to connect the ecological information [about African golden cats] with the work we are doing with the communities,” Mugerwa says.
But to do all this, the organization needs money — a challenge Mugerwa has faced since the inception of his work. “Raising funds for a very unknown and less-understood species was challenging,” he says, adding he’s grateful for the increasing interest, knowledge and awareness surrounding African golden cats. While many international donors have partnered with Embaka, money is slow to trickle in. “It is still a problem because the more work you do, you realize there is much more you can do, and that needs money,” he says.
Between fundraising, coordinating with partners across Africa, preparing reports and proposals, and pursuing a doctorate at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, Mugerwa is a busy man. “Sometimes it gives me sleepless nights,” he says of the balancing act, “but I love what I am doing.”
Building on the lessons he’s learned about community-driven conservation, Mugerwa says he’s optimistic about the future of Embaka — the cat and its namesake organization. “When I started in 2010, with that first black-and-white image, this is where I wanted to be,” he says, “It’s been quite a journey.”
Banner image: Africa’s only forest-dependent cats, Caracal aurata are found in West and Central Africa. Image via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).
Slagter, B., Fesenmyer, K., Hethcoat, M., Belair, E., Ellis, P., Kleinschroth, F., … Reiche, J. (2024). Monitoring road development in Congo Basin forests with multi-sensor satellite imagery and deep learning. Remote Sensing of Environment, 114380. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2024.114380
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