A baby mountain gorilla found clinging to its mother's dead body in the Democratic Republic of Congo is "more or less OK" and has been feeding on baby formula from a bottle, wildlife conservationists said Sunday.

The two-month-old female, named Ndakasi by conservationists, had been left to fend for herself after her mother — a rare, protected mountain gorilla who made her home on the Virunga nature reserve — was killed by a close-range gunshot to the back of the head.

Ndakasi , a two-month-old mountain gorilla baby named after a recently deceased ranger is held Sunday at the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project in Goma, Congo. She was found clinging to her slain mother, Rubiga.
(Rob Muir/AFP/Getty Images)

Emmanuel de Merode of the conservation group Wildlife Direct described the shooting to Reuters as "execution-style."

De Merode told Reuters from the city of Goma, where Ndakasi is being treated, that guards found what appeared to be bananas used to bait the adult female. The trail led to the bloody site where the young gorilla was discovered latching onto her mother.

De Merode added that a second gorilla was probably shot "because there was a trail of blood nearby and three gunshots were heard," but the other gorilla likely escaped wounded.

'Not hopeless'

Paulin Ngobobo, the senior warden in eastern Congo's Virunga National Park, told Reuters the young mountain gorilla was born on April 15.

"She's more or less OK. It is certainly a worrying situation, but not hopeless," Ngobobo said.

National park rangers believe the adult female was killed on Friday because that's when residents reported hearing gunfire. The grim scene was discovered on Saturday.

Poachers unlikely

Questions were still swirling over who killed Ndakasi's mother and for what reason, since the body was left at the scene rather than taken away. Rebels who live off the land to evade patrols by the regular army have been known to hunt and eat endangered gorillas.

Ngobobo also dismissed the possibility that poachers were involved, saying that poachers would not have missed a lucrative opportunity to take the infant away for sale on the black market.

Only 700 mountain gorillas survive in the wild, more than half of them in Virunga, according to Reuters. The Democratic Republic of Congo is home to gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos (better known as pygmy chimps).

Last month, rebels targeting Virunga park rangers killed one wildlife officer and critically injured three others, Wildlife Direct said. The group said 150 rangers have been killed in the last decade.

UNESCO inscribed the Virunga National Park on the list of World Heritage in Danger sites in 1994 because of mass poaching and deforestation in the 790,000-hectare habitat.