"Dr. Galdikas walked up to a dozen miles through a dense wood plagued by fire ants and pit vipers. Most nights, she arrived back at her bark-walled hut 'drenched in sweat and convinced that the wild orangutans had all moved out of the study area simply to spite me.'"
"Finally, on Christmas Eve, Dr. Galdikas heard a branch snap a hundred feet up. She peered into the canopy and saw a 70-pound female orangutan with an infant on her shoulder."
"By the end of the day, Dr. Galdikas had 30 pages of notes and the beginning of what would become the world's longest continuous study by one person of a wild mammal."
"Leakey had told Dr. Galdikas he would pay for 10 years of research. But by the end of that first observation, Dr. Galdikas had decided a decade would not be enough."
Biruté Galdikas spent two months in the rainforest before encountering an orangutan, facing numerous challenges in Indonesian Borneo. At 25, she left a comfortable life in Los Angeles for this immersive scientific study. As part of the 'Trimates,' she aimed to match the successes of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. On Christmas Eve, she finally spotted an orangutan, leading to a significant observation that contributed to the longest continuous study of a wild mammal. Galdikas realized that a decade of research would not suffice for her goals.
Read at The Washington Post
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]