— 7 —
It is predawn dark in the rain forest of southern Borneo. The dark is thick and dense with sound. Insects and frogs trill and keen to their kind. Cicadas buzz and whirr, loud as chainsaws. The hot, wet air is heavy with the scents of bloom and decay. There is no breeze; the breath of the forest is its voices, heaving and sighing.
Before first light the gibbons whoop their alien, elastic duets. Tiny, sharp-hoofed deer bark like dogs; birds whistle like trains; you see nothing, hear everything. And then, at daybreak, silence.
Life piles thick upon itself. Vines fat as pythons writhe over buttressed trees. Epiphytic ferns and orchids hang from branches. Barbed rattan, thin as cobwebs, claws at your clothing. Life feeds openly, obscenely on death: a column of ants carries away a dying caterpillar. A butterfly, with curled tongue, sucks salt from the open eye of a dead shrew. The strangler fig, born of a seed lodged securely in the arms of a nursery tree, drops its roots around the trunk of its foster mother. Finally she is suffocated by her fosterling’s clasping loins and entombed.
This is at once a hell and an Eden, seething with life and death, growth and decay. Here your senses overwhelm you. But you cannot trust them. Far from the forests of Europe and North America—sturdy, orderly, dry, cool—here the meanings you glean from vision, scent, taste are distorted like a funhouse mirror. Nothing is as it seems.
Walking, you look at drops of water falling on your shoes and think it is raining; but it is only the sweat falling from your face in the ninety-degree heat. A fallen tree bridging a swamp crumbles under your boots, plunging you into thigh-deep muck. Great trees tower 150 feet high; their buttressed roots sink only six inches deep. The knees of mangroves, roots pointed like stalagmites, rise upward from the swamp like hands from a grave in a horror movie.
Here bark can burn you with caustic sap, or river water caress you like satin. Fire ants may pour from a handhold, or butterflies light on your skin. Falling fruit can kill you. One of the main trees here is the durian. Its coconut-sized fruit, which in season falls hourly, is macelike, covered with sharp spines; hit by a falling durian, you could die from the wounds. When opened, the durian fruit smells like rotting onions, but its satiny white flesh tastes like a rich, buttery custard flavored with almonds; “such an excellent taste,” commented one traveler, Jan Huygen van Linschoten in 1599, “that it surpasses in flavour all the other fruits of the world.”
If you stand still in the forest, inch-long black leeches come toward you from every direction like heat-seeking missiles; they loop forward like inchworms, standing upright and waving their mouths in the air, sensing your warmth. Like a dozen other creatures in this forest, they feed on blood. They inject an anticoagulant as they feed, so the site will gush blood for an hour. Their bite is painless.
The ground is alive with leeches, ants, spiders, sweat bees. The soil, fetid and fecund, digests death so ravenously that within six months, 90 percent of its organic matter will be recycled back into the life of the forest—a process that in dry forest takes three years. The speed of decay is one reason for the great diversity of life forms, compared to those of temperate forests. Great Britain, for example, has 34 species of native trees; here there are 600, as well as 200 species of mammals and 550 species of birds. Life dazzles in profusion and form. Bamboo, a grass that grows out of scale, towers over your head; pitcher plants gape carnivorous and green. Here live the pink-faced proboscis monkey with the gigantic nose; the colugo, or flying lemur, which is not a lemur at all but a glider, the single member of its order; the flying fox, a fruit bat with a wingspan of six feet; the pangolin, a scale-covered anteater; the secretive cloud leopard; and the only Asian great ape, the only red ape: the orangutan.
This is the place Biruté Galdikas chose as her home.
When Biruté met Louis Leakey, she was working on her M.A. in anthropology at UCLA. She planned to earn money as an archeologist and, with her savings, one day launch a study of wild orangutans in Indonesia. She says she was always fascinated by this most arboreal ape, the one great ape that never left the Garden of Eden, the ape with human eyes. She hoped the orangutan, rather than the chimpanzee or gorilla, would prove to be man’s closest relative.
Her meeting with Louis after his lecture to her class was like a promise fulfilled. “I knew, even before I went up to him. As soon as I heard him talk about primates and great ape studies, and sending Jane and Dian into the field, I knew this was it. I knew I’d be going.”
Yet destiny is not fate; destiny can be failed or refused. Biruté’s confidence wavered when she found herself, on a late summer’s day in 1970, knocking on the door of the Goodalls’ flat on Earl’s Court Road in London. That night Louis orchestrated and hosted the first meeting of his “three primates,” Jane and Biruté and Dian. Jane had been working in Tanzania for ten years by then; Dian, in Zaire and Rwanda, for three. Biruté was in awe of them both. “All of a sudden, it hit me,” Biruté recalls. “I really was going to the rain forest of Indonesia.”
At one point during the evening she turned to Jane and asked, “What am I going to DO?”
“You’re going to do exactly as I did,” Jane replied. “You’re going to go out and find them.”
After Biruté’s first meeting with Louis, two and a half years passed before he secured funding for the orangutan study. It took so long that at one point, Leakey suggested she study pygmy chimpanzees in Zaire instead. But just as Dian had held out for mountain gorillas when her study was interrupted, Biruté held out for orangutans.
By 1971 Louis had amassed only $9,000 from various sources: the Wilkie Brothers Foundation, the Jane and Justin Dart Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, National Geographic. When Biruté and her husband Rod Brindamour left for Indonesia that September, they brought only what would fit in two large backpacks: four sets of clothing, two compasses, some notebooks, two raincapes, cooking and scientific gear, a single flashlight. It was all they could afford.
Only a handful of scientists had studied wild orangutans before. One two-month study had ended without a single orangutan being sighted. During a fifty-two-day survey in North Borneo, a Japanese primatologist, T. Okano, saw only one. Two other researchers, including primatologist George Schaller, had conducted longer studies. Much of their data came from counting the orangutans’ empty treetop night nests.
David Horr and John MacKinnon were the first Westerners to conduct long-term studies of the species. They had worked independently of each other in the Malaysian province of Sabah in northern Borneo. Horr’s research extended over two years; MacKinnon put in 1,200 hours of observation there, and later another 200 hours watching wild orangutans in Sumatra. They learned that the orangutan was largely solitary, that its favored fruit was the durian, and that it spent most of its time in the trees, building a new nest to sleep in each night.
No one had ever seen an orangutan give birth. No one had observed male orangutans fighting. Little was known about how far an individual might travel, how they selected their mates, how mothers cared for their young, how subadults matured into adults. So little was known about orangutan reproduction that one researcher was convinced that males stopped mating when they became adult.
Biruté and Rod planned to carry out the longest continuous study of wild orangutans ever attempted. They planned to work at Mount Looser Reserve in Sumatra, where orangutans had been studied before.
They never got there.
First there was a stopover in Kenya, to visit with the Leakeys on safari, then a visit to Gombe, observing chimpanzees with Jane Goodall. Then an unplanned-for week in India—both Biruté and Rod were waylaid with intestinal infections and diarrhea. They bought some scientific supplies in Singapore, where they could be purchased cheaply. Their first weeks in Indonesia were spent contacting officials and negotiating for their scientific study permits.
The head of Indonesian parks and nature reserves listened politely to their plans to go to the well-mapped park in Sumatra. Then he told them: “You look like the kind of people who want to be first. You don’t want to follow in other people’s footsteps.” He decided they should go to Tanjung Puting, a roughly 250,000-hectare reserve on a peninsula on the south coast of Borneo. Its boundaries had never been mapped, its interior never explored. But some months earlier, three people from the city of Bogor had visited the reserve and seen orangutans there.
So in the company of an Indonesian forestry official and a camp cook they had hired in the town of Kumai, Biruté and Rod made the ten-hour boat journey down the weed-choked Sekoyner-Cannon River to the reserve. Their camp, which they named in honor of their mentor, was an abandoned nipa-thatched hut that had been built for forest rangers. As the first rain poured through the roof of Camp Leakey, they discovered that the name was doubly apt.
For the first year the short, slim, golden-skinned Melayu people—Moslem farmers and rubber tappers originally from Kumai—were the only humans they saw. At the end of 1972 the first white face they encountered, Biruté wrote, “came as a shock.” It would be three years before Biruté left Indonesia, even briefly, for a primatology conference in Europe, and four before Rod would visit the West.
The couple lived in poverty. They ate mainly rice, supplemented with tinned sardines, canned, greasy pigs’ feet, and bananas. They cooked over an open fire fueled by fallen branches collected in the forest. Their shoes and clothes rotted. At one point Rod held what remained of his boots together by binding the soles to his feet with rattan.
Biruté would take along only a thermos filled with cold coffee as she searched the forests each day; Rod took their only flashlight as he went to cut trails. They waded through swamps up to their armpits; the skin on their feet shriveled from constant immersion. They hacked their way through vines with machetes. Biruté searched the trees for what one might think would be obvious: a two-hundred-pound primate covered with bright red fur. But all she saw, she remembers, was “a miscellaneous mass of green.” The couple would often return after dark, Biruté stumbling over vines and roots.
They found the forest booby-trapped with hidden jaws. Poisonous caterpillars dropped from trees. Long-snouted crocodiles—false gharials—lurked submerged in the tea-colored rivers. Streams of fire ants, whose black bodies had a red sheen, were a constant annoyance. Biruté saw animals caught in traps set by the Dayaks fall victim to these ants; the trapper would find only a skeleton after the ants ate away the flesh.
Snakes were everywhere, coiling arrogantly in patient, perfect camouflage. One night Biruté felt something soft and smooth brush her leg; she walked a few meters and then looked back, shining her flashlight. A cobra reared erect, looking her in the eye.
There were fevers and tick bites, and every scratch seemed to go septic. As Biruté and Rod took off their wet clothes at night, “fat black leeches, bloated with our blood, dropped out of our socks and off our necks and fell out of our underwear,” she wrote in a National Geographic article. But all of this did not bother Biruté; though aware of its dangers, she found the forest peaceful, beautiful. What frightened her, depressed her, ate at her, was the fact that she was encountering no orangutans.
“I couldn’t find them, I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t make contact with them—of course I felt pressured,” Biruté recalls. It was ten days before she even glimpsed an orangutan—sixty to eighty feet up in the trees, mostly obscured by leaves—and it quickly moved away while Biruté tried to extricate her boots from the sucking ooze of the swamp.
Because the couple had arrived at Tanjung Puting during the rainy season, it was impossible to follow an orangutan in the swollen swamps. On dry ground walking was easier, but, once sighted, the animals were usually irritated by the attention; they would hurl branches, shriek, and, with admirable accuracy, urinate and defecate on their heads. Rod was once hit in the eye with an orangutan turd that exploded all over his face on impact. Orangutans also use dead trees, or snags, to discourage observers. Several times Biruté has watched helplessly as a snag, pushed by a male orangutan, toppled toward her in horror-movie-like slow motion. She would think: This is what it is like to die. Each time the trunk has either broken on its way down or been deflected by vines; but trees have crashed inches from her feet.
It was two months before Biruté was able to follow an orangutan for more than part of one day. She encountered a female and her offspring one morning at seven and succeeded in following her until dark, when the animal constructed a nest of leaves and went to sleep for the night. Both Biruté and Rod returned to the nest before dawn the next morning and waited beneath the tree in the steaming dark. Long after dawn the nest began shaking, and the female, whom they named Beth, and her infant emerged.
They followed as the two moved and fed, fed and rested. It rained every day. Biruté and Rod tried to dry their clothes each night over the fire; one night the clothes caught fire and burned off one leg of their four pairs of jeans. One afternoon, as the orangutan rested, Biruté sat briefly on a fallen rangas log. That night she discovered that her buttocks had been burned black by toxic sap. She could not sit down or sleep on her back for a week afterward.
They followed the mother and infant for five days, encountering no other orangutans the whole time and observing no behavior more revealing than traveling, resting, and feeding. And then they lost the pair. Biruté was not able to establish this long a follow for another three months.
Most primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons, travel in groups. If you want to study baboons, for example, you find a troop, pick a different “target” animal to observe each day, and in the course of a month you have data on thirty different individuals. At the same time you are habituating all thirty animals to human presence.
“The orangutan,” Jane Goodall agrees, “is the hardest of the three great apes to study.” Because they are solitary and arboreal, “it takes Biruté a year to gather information and to see behaviors I might see in one lucky day.”
This solitary species must be habituated to human presence one animal at a time. It took Biruté and Rod six months to partially habituate a single animal, a prime male she called Throat Pouch. The beachball-like air sac under his chin was perpetually inflated; most males balloon their normally flaccid pouches only to produce the territorial long call. Biruté was terrified that Throat Pouch had cancer; if he died or left the area, she would have to start all over again. She began to realize just how monumental was the task she had chosen.
Orangutans’ lives progress, like most of their movements, with a dignified and serene leisure. Biruté has compared watching them to watching sloths; chimps are positively frenetic in comparison. “The most common complaint of the primatologist intrepid enough to study orangutans,” wrote Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a sociobiologist and primatologist, “is that in hours and hours of observation the adults almost never do anything, almost never meet anyone; rather, they munch endlessly and rest.”
Orangutans reveal themselves only slowly. It was eight years before Biruté saw an orangutan use a tool—a thirty-five-second incident in which a male used a stick to scratch his behind. It was more than fifteen years before the female orangutans she first met as infants began bearing their first babies. And this, from the start, was her goal: “I wanted to follow them from the time they were born until the time they died.”
In the first four years she and Rod logged 6,804 hours of observation on fifty-eight named wild individuals—four times the observation hours accumulated by her predecessor, John MacKinnon. She followed them even while she was wracked with fever and bleeding from wounds. After she took on the job of rehabilitating former captives, she followed them with orphaned baby orangutans clinging to her body. She followed them on swollen legs, nine months pregnant with her first child. She began to gather their individual life stories.
She watched males battle for females and territory. Sometimes the battles lasted for hours. She watched Throat Pouch grappling with another male in a tree. They grabbed each other like sumo wrestlers. They bit each other. Often they fell from the tree and chased each other back up to resume fighting, their backs glistening with beads of sweat. Sometimes, she said, they parted and just glared at each other. Finally they separated and sat in adjacent trees. Throat Pouch shoved a dead tree over and then uttered the long call: a series of grumbles, followed by intense roaring and bellowing, subsiding into grumbles and sighs. The other male vanished. The smell of their sweat lingered heavy in the air for hours.
She watched males and females together in courtship and consummation. Most matings occur in the context of consortship: an adult male and female travel together for at least three days, feeding, nuzzling, mating. They make love as humans do, most often belly to belly, and frequently the female reclines against a branch. Usually female orangutans, during the receptive point in their thirty-day cycle, seek the company of an adult male, often moving toward the sound of his long call. Normally shy females may turn brazen: once Biruté saw Beth accost a prime adult male, shake a vine in his face, slap his stomach, and tweak his penis. When all this failed to arouse his attentions, she urinated on his head. Eventually the two moved off together.
But also there is rape. Occasionally males—often subadults—will copulate forcibly with adult females. These instances are not the mild tussles typical of courtship in many other species; the female struggles fiercely and tries to bite the male whenever she can. She emits a peculiar, distressed grunt—Biruté calls it the “rape grunt”— never heard in any other context.
When Biruté first came to Tanjung Puting, the rubber tappers told her that male orangutans will also rape human women. In fact a Dayak legend explains the male orangutan’s long call in this light: he is calling for his human lover, a woman he stole from a riverboat but who escaped from the night nest to which he brought her. Biruté knew that many mammals, from dogs to cougars, become excited by the scent of menstruating human females, but she dismissed the legends about orangutans. She would walk through the forest with blood soaking through her jeans each month, for Kotex and tampons were not available in the nearby towns.
Years later a wild adult male orangutan came into her camp and raped a female Indonesian cook. Fortunately the woman was uninjured and she was not socially ostracized for her ordeal. Today Biruté warns women visitors that if they are menstruating they should carry a stick with them and never walk alone among the male ex-captives.
Biruté was one of the first observers to document prolonged social interaction among wild orangutans. Like human teenagers, adolescent and subadult orangutans (from age seven to adulthood) are the most social group, particularly the females. Two or more adolescent females may travel together for days, part, then reunite, sometimes gently grooming or touching one another.
One of the most moving relationships she observed was an odd one, between a subadult male and an adolescent female. Theirs was such a long-lasting friendship that Biruté and Rod thought of them as a pair and called them Mute and Noisy. For years the two orangutans would travel together for more than ten days at a time. This was not a consortship; Mute often raped other females but never attacked Noisy. Once when Mute was forcibly copulating with a female, Noisy attacked Mute’s victim. And when Noisy first became receptive, she sought the company of a large cheek-padded male named Nick. Nick and Noisy consorted, mating several times, but Biruté saw Mute several times lurking in the background nearby, sneaking looks at his friend and her lover from behind the trunks of trees.
Unlike Jane and Dian, who initially described what they saw in narrative field notes, Biruté recorded the behaviors she witnessed on a check sheet, minute by minute. She focused on only one orangutan at a time, even when a female was traveling with offspring, or when the animal met up with others—a technique known as focal animal sampling. She carefully catalogued the hundreds of plants and insects the orangutans ate, sometimes tasting them herself. She inventoried every plant in three different plots in the study area, identifying more than 400 species, and meticulously recorded the trees’ fruiting and growth.
Biruté’s 333-page Ph.D. dissertation was submitted to UCLA in 1978. It was dedicated to the memory of Louis Leakey, who had died in 1972. The thesis was enthusiastically received: independent reviewers called her work “monumental.” Jane Goodall, in a letter to the Leakey Foundation, praised Biruté’s work lavishly. “Her data are excellent as are her field methods,” she wrote. The Washington University primatologist Robert Sussman, echoing many other opinions, called Biruté’s work “the best of the three” Leakey protégées.
Unlike Jane and Dian, Biruté was trained in modern data-collecting techniques and statistical analysis. Her thesis presents ninety-one tables of numerical data. She statistically correlates orangutan groupings by sex, age, number of animals present; catalogues long calls by time of day and duration; plots the frequency of consort and nonconsort copulations. The focal animal sampling technique she used from the start had by 1974 been recognized as the most accurate and revealing method available for recording behavioral information.
Biruté was as concerned with theory as with findings. She had hoped her study animal would prove to be man’s closest relative, but DNA analysis later gave the chimpanzee that honor. However, her observations yielded the best portrait to date of how man’s ancestors may have lived before they left the trees.
A theory she advanced in a 1981 paper, coauthored by Gombe primatologist Geza Teleki, generated much excitement and debate among researchers. The paper argues persuasively that male and female orangutans and chimpanzees use different food resources and that in this “ecological separation” could well lie the origins of human labor division: hunting males and foraging females. Thirteen respected primatologists and anthropologists commented on the paper in the journal Current Anthropology.
But after an initial flurry of excitement, Western scientists’ enthusiasm for Biruté’s work began to fade. For after the first decade of her research, Biruté’s scientific career, as well as her personal life, diverged dramatically from the Western norm.
Rod Brindamour left his wife in the middle of 1979. He had, he felt, paid his dues to his wife’s career. He had surveyed and staked transects and cut more than fifty miles of trails through the swamp and forest. He had meticulously photographed his wife’s work. He had helped her develop friendships with Indonesian officials, made recordings of orangutan calls, and managed the camp.
Years of festering tropical ulcers had eaten purple holes in his legs. He was tired of sleeping with ex-captive orangutan orphans in his bed. He had put off his own career plans for seven and a half years. Now Rod wanted to go home. Biruté thought she had made it clear from the start that she wanted to study orangutans for the rest of her life. But Rod had not understood. “He thought it would be more like what most primatologists do, in other words, have a life that’s based in North America, and go back and forth to visit,” Biruté recalls.
Two years later Biruté married Pak Bohap bin Jalan, a Dayak. It took four months for them to secure official permission to wed; they were even asked to get written approval from the governor of the province. They were the first Indonesian-Western couple ever to marry in the province of Kalimantan Tengah.
It is an unusual partnership. Pak Bohap is seven years Briuté’s junior, and at five foot two, he is significantly smaller than his wife. She is a member of Bat Conservation International; he hunts bats for food with the traditional Dayak blowpipe and poisoned darts. And unlike the Melayu, orthodox Moslems who consider it a sin to eat pigs or monkeys, the Dayaks, former headhunters and animists, have no proscriptions against eating orangutans. But now it is Pak Bohap’s work to protect orangutans. After their marriage, Pak Bohap became the codirector of Biruté’s Orangutan Project and a principal collaborator in her work.
Pak Bohap’s forest skills are unparalleled. He can run barefoot through the swamps. In seconds, while holding a lit cigarette in one hand, he can climb a tree and triangulate precisely the best spot from which to view an orangutan from the ground. He can tell you, from looking at bent twigs, which animal passed by here and how long ago, how quickly it was going, and sometimes what brought it here in the first place. He can pinpoint the source of any forest sound, from bird song to an orangutan long call, with uncanny accuracy.
Unlike the farming Melayu, the Dayaks, Borneo’s aboriginal inhabitants, have lived in these forests for centuries. All of Biruté’s orangutan trackers are Dayaks, and many of them are relatives of Pak Bohap.
Even after decades in the rainforest, “I’ve come to the conclusion that even though I’ve been here a long time, I think to me it’s a foreign language,” Biruté told me. “Even though as a child I spent a lot of time in temperate woods, this was a different type of nature. For the people who live here, the Dayaks, the forest is their first language, and they speak it with the native accent.”
With skilled Dayak trackers the project can now carry on seven different orangutan follows at once. Two Dayaks go together on a follow, which lasts from before dawn until the orangutan builds its night nest, sometimes after dark. One person makes notations on the data sheet; the other collects food samples and notes the orangutan’s direction of travel, using tree markers Rod put in place when creating the transects. If possible, each team will follow an individual orangutan for ten days.
As Biruté’s staff has grown, so has the camp’s budget. The Orangutan Project has been funded by some of the most prestigious granting organizations in Western science, including the National Geographic Society for more than six years. The organization’s long-term support of Louis Leakey’s work and that of his “three primates” was unusual; normally it sponsors only single expeditions or short-term projects. Biruté’s project also found funding from the World Wildlife Fund, the New York Zoological Society, the Chicago Zoological Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. But the money has never stretched far enough.
From the beginning Biruté worked with only the most rudimentary equipment. The project had a boat but not a car. In April 1972, Biruté cut herself badly with a machete and needed a doctor’s attention. She traveled all night on the sputtering wooden boat, the only way to reach the tiny Melayu town of Kumai; once there, she had to wait all the next day to flag down a passing car to take her to the hospital in Pangkalanbuun.
Arlene Masters, whose sixteen-year-old daughter visited Camp Leakey in 1979, wrote to the Leakey Foundation in alarm that the Orangutan Project was “in imminent danger of extinction for lack of funds.” That year grants and donations totaling only $8,000 supported a staff of fifteen people. Biruté, who was never salaried, then had no speedboat, no two-way radio. One of her colleagues, Gary Shapiro, had to sell his car and other possessions to fund his passage to work with her at Tanjung Puting.
Biruté remembers that at one point in 1979, only $49 was left in the bank account, and the camp was $5,000 in debt. That year an anonymous donor replenished the account. “We lived from miracle to miracle,” Biruté says. National Geographic terminated its support in 1982. “While it has been rewarding scientifically, the committee is reluctant to continue with support for long-term projects,” the letter read. Her project was without a sustaining benefactor.
Since its first grant to her of $60,000, Earthwatch provided most of the funds for her work from 1984–1993. To work at Camp Leakey with Biruté for two weeks, each volunteer paid Earthwatch about $1,800, not including airfare. Between June and November, about six teams of eight to sixteen volunteers arrived in Pangkalanbuun. They nursed orphaned ex-captives and followed Dayak trackers to observe wild orangutans. They recorded the interactions of ex-captive mothers and their offspring, using a data sheet modified from one designed by Jane Goodall; they typed Biruté’s correspondence; occasionally catalogued botanical plots, worked in the herbarium, or went on river patrols to chase illegal fishermen or wild rubber tappers out of the park.
With so diverse a crowd, problems sometimes arose. Several volunteers fled Biruté’s camp early. One said he left because he found a scorpion under his bed. One Earthwatcher was attacked by a Malayan sun bear, though he escaped without being bitten. One large problem was that the volunteers, usually women, sometimes had affairs with the Dayak staff members; when the women left, the men were heartbroken.
Volunteers sometimes lacked the physical strength needed to follow wild orangutans in the forest. Some of the first English words Dayak trackers learned from Earthwatchers were “God-damnit, slow down!” Biruté found that in the first year of Earthwatch support the orangutan follows got shorter, but the Dayaks’ success in finding orangutans in the forest increased by 30 percent. Westerners are considered high-status visitors, and often a successful tracker will be rewarded with gifts of boots, jeans, or sneakers from a grateful Earthwatch volunteer.
“The presence of volunteers galvanized the research efforts of Project staff,” Biruté wrote in her Earthwatch field report in 1985. In December of that year, the Project logged 936 hours of orangutan observation—more than Biruté had achieved in her entire first year of study.
Ironically, during Camp Leakey’s most productive decade of research, Western scientists’ view of Biruté’s work considerably cooled.
The most frequent criticism is that she doesn’t publish. “The fact of the matter is,” John Mitani, a respected primatologist who has studied all three of the great ape species, told me, “She’s published virtually nothing beyond her first few years of work. There’s a big black hole out there. I’m very anxious to know what has happened in the last ten years.”
Since then, Biruté has authored two popular books to answer that question. In 1995, the venerable Little Brown Company published her 408-page autobiography, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo. A more informal book, Orangutan Odyssey, coauthored with collaborator Nancy Briggs and with an introduction by Jane Goodall, followed in 1999, lavished with delightful photographs by Karl Ammann. But to Biruté’s chagrin, hers were not the last words on the subject of her life. In the late 1990s, Canadian novelist and reporter Linda Spaulding published a series of scathing, controversial articles in the popular press and two books, the first published in Canada under the title The Follow and the second in the United States as A Dark Place in the Jungle. Spaulding alleged, among other things, that the rehabilitation project did wild orangutans more harm than good, that Biruté was hoarding orphaned orangutans in squalor, and that she kept much of the money raised for conservation for herself. Biruté sued the author for libel in 1999. The disposition of that suit has not been made public.
Scientists like to think themselves above such squabbles in the popular press. It is by scholarly publications by which they judge their fellows. And by this measure, researchers claim Biruté comes up short.
“The project just doesn’t generate publications,” said one anonymous reviewer. “It simply isn’t scholarly enough.” Another former supporter says Biruté did not deliver field reports on time; without this documentation the agency could not renew her grant, although the money had already been amassed and earmarked for her project. A former Earthwatch reviewer admitted anonymously that this was the reason the organization was forced to cease its collaboration with one of its most popular investigators. (Today Biruté’s Orangutan Foundation leads tourists on seven-day formal tours for $3,400 per person, but the visitors do not collect data for Biruté, and do not overnight at Camp Leakey.)
When I asked Biruté about her lack of publications back in 1988, I was surprised at her response. “I agree,” Biruté told me. Publishing more papers, she said, is “something I should do, but it’s number 302 on my list of priorities. . . .” And that was before the Orangutan Care and Quarantine Facility was constructed at Pangkalanbuun, which today contains 340 orphaned and ex-captive orangutans—an enormous drain on her time, to say the least. The needs of these individuals cannot be put off; publishing field reports can. So science falls by the wayside. Not even Biruté’s website is current; in fall 2008, the most recent review of field news listed was for 2005.
Lack of time is a common complaint among field scientists who must at once collect data, negotiate with foreign officials, and administer a large camp in a Third World country. Most field biologists, as Biruté has pointed out, spend a month or two in the field collecting data, then return to their comfortable labs and universities to spend nine or ten months writing it up. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey both faced the same problems as Biruté; in Dian’s case her backers essentially forced her to leave Rwanda for nearly three years to write up her findings in Gorillas in the Mist.
“To put things in perspective,” says John Mitani, “when you look at Fossey and Goodall, it’s helped them getting other scientists in there to kick their butts.” In the scientific heyday of the research at Gombe, he points out, Jane’s students and staff often outnumbered the study animals. Even when Jane couldn’t find time to publish, her students kept a steady stream of publications flowing. Although Dian had fewer students, several who were respected in their field published widely and thus raised Karisoke’s status as a research station.
Biruté has mentored many students. But most are Indonesians and have published in Bahasa Indonesia, a language inaccessible to most Western scientists. And in reality, Camp Leakey is not primarily a community of scientists. Her critics charge that it is little more than a Dayak village disrupted by tourists and overrun by tame orangutans.
Biruté’s orangutan rehabilitation work has never had much scientific support. “It has been generally agreed that returning human-oriented animals . . . into healthy wild populations is not a useful exercise,” states John MacKinnon. Biruté says MacKinnon has told her privately that he was referring not to her project but to one at Sepilok; but such disapproval is echoed widely in scientific and conservation literature. This view is so well accepted that it has even found its way into popular animal encyclopedias.
Each wild adult orangutan needs a relatively large tract of land to find enough food, as Biruté amply demonstrated in her early work. The ex-captives she releases could potentially usurp the food resources of wild-born orangutans. There is no evidence to prove that they do not. It is clear, however, from Biruté’s data that the well-fed ex-captives weigh more, mature faster, and give birth more frequently than do wild orangutans. At one time Biruté was quietly looking into implantable birth control devices for ex-captive females.
In response to colleagues’ criticism, Biruté points out that the project serves to check the illegal trade in orangutans; without her center, local forestry officials would have nowhere to place confiscated pet orangutans. The project is also good public relations. In one year seven hundred Indonesian tourists visited Camp Leakey, mainly to see the ex-captive orangutans.
But beyond these justifications is this fact: if Biruté did not take in the ex-captives, they would live and die in captivity. And this is the ultimate reason she remains committed to the rehabilitation project: “These individual orangutans have a right to survive and a right to return to the forest,” she says.
This is where Biruté’s outlook diverges from that of most of her scientific colleagues. In her Earthwatch expedition briefings, she printed Camp Leakey’s cardinal rule: “Remember that in camp the orangutans come FIRST, science second, local staff and people third, and we, the foreign researchers, LAST.”
Early in her study, in 1974, Biruté started seeing wild orangutans suffering from a hideous skin disease. She wrote a friend in the States about one of the stricken babies: “Carl is absolutely disfigured. I can barely refrain from crying whenever I look at him.” The afflicted animals lost huge patches of hair, and their skin became leathery and wrinkled; wounds opened where scratching broke the skin and the bloody flesh protruded.
Biruté and Rod retrieved the body of one infant who died of the disease and sent tissue and organ samples to American pathology labs. They tried offering the wild orangutans fruits with medicine hidden inside, but the wild animals would not accept the proffered foods; eventually the afflicted animals either died or spontaneously recovered on their own. But for Biruté and Rod, there was never any question about whether they should try to help the orangutans. Scientific integrity was not the issue. What mattered, said Biruté, was that orangutans were suffering, and she would try to help them if she could.
In 1979 a scientist working with Biruté suggested they try monitoring the orangutans’ movements with radio tracking devices. He spoke enthusiastically of a colleague’s project: he had tranquilized howler monkeys in Panama and put radio collars on them. The project worked well, and they had a “sacrifice” rate (the percentage of animals who died because of the capture and tranquilizer) of only 8 percent, which was considered very low.
Radio collars wouldn’t work for orangutans; Biruté knew the animals would deftly remove the devices. So her colleague proposed surgically implanting radio tracking devices under the skin. “He was certain this could be done,” Biruté remembers. “He was convinced we could do it.” The idea was exciting. With such devices Biruté could conceivably keep track of every wild orangutan in the study area simultaneously—a scientific coup, beyond her wildest dreams. But she shelved the plans for the project.
Biruté takes a deep draw from her clove-flavored cigarette, as if to inhale the memory: “You know where we parted ways? It was very interesting, you know? Where we parted ways was, he was a scientist. His first priority was science. He was Harvard educated, very smart, quite brilliant, I would say. He was the smartest primatologist I’ve ever met, and a nice man, a very nice man. I said, OK, if we go through with this and one orangutan dies, that’s it. We stop immediately. And he said, oh, no, no, no—our sample would be too small, from a scientific point of view. And if we had already got funding, we just couldn’t stop at one dead orangutan. And I said, no, if just one dies, that’s it, it’s over. Because I, in full conscience, could not continue any project or any endeavor that was harmful to orangutans. I just wouldn’t do it.
“This is where we parted ways. We had been good friends, we’d been collaborating, but it was like, all of a sudden, two worlds clashed. He put science first. And I was thinking, is that the difference between a man and a woman?”
“I have given up a lot for orangutans,” Biruté once told an interviewer. “I’ll never have a life with Rod, a house with a mortgage paid off, or tenure, or any of the trappings of success.” She made these statements completely without remorse or self-pity; she was simply making an observation, as if she were describing the configuration of a leaf.
Today, though, she now has what she thought she had lost. She has tenure at Simon Fraser. She has a husband whom she loves; she says that despite their disparate backgrounds, Pak Bohap understands her better than Rod ever did. She has a home in Canada and another in Pasir Panjang, a Dayak village near Pangkalanbuun. During my visit I was impressed it had electricity and a color television, thanks to her personal generator—a great luxury in 1988.
And Camp Leakey had grown considerably since the early days. In the 1970s, the provincial government built a 200-meter ironwood boardwalk and dock. The Camp complex expanded to number seven buildings, including a dining hall and guest house for visitors, with wire mesh over the windows to bar ex-captives from entering. Biruté’s private quarters and the guest dormitory offered bathrooms, each with a tall, square bak mandi from which you dip water to pour over yourself for a bath. (I preferred to bathe with the orangutans and false gharials in the river, though.) A generator powered lights till about 9 P.M. and a small refrigerator. And the diet, though simple, was tasty and healthful: fish, rice, noodles, a variety of vegetables, tiny sweet bananas, pineapple, papaya, and on special occasions, Cokes and cakes.
But though her life was much easier than when she started, I was shaken to see that many basics were lacking in camp. A French film company, for instance, had donated a speedboat. But by the end of one trip to town, the Dayak assistant piloting it was nearly blinded by insects that flew into his eyes. The boat’s windscreen had been removed by orangutans, and he had no goggles to protect his eyes. I also noted that more than half the drugs, all of them donated, that Biruté kept in her medicine chest had expired months before. (In the small hospital in Pankalanbuun, the drugs were even older, and the walls of the surgery were splattered with blood.) The heat, the diet, and tropical disease have taken a toll on Biruté’s health; occasionally at dinner she would have to stop chewing her meal, because another piece of a tooth had fallen out.
Biruté knows full well that she could have traded this for a comfortable full-time post at a North American or European university. In her first few years of study she proved she could do the science. Her methods were impeccable, her data were sound, her theories were innovative. Her scientific reputation was established.
Some field biologists would say that Biruté blew it. She could be working full-time at a university. She could be spending her time working up and publishing her data, collecting the admiration of her scientific peers. But no. She stays in the grip of the wet heat of Indonesia, mothering ex-captive orangutans, an activity that few scientists respect, and trekking through the forest with Dayaks.
One could argue that Biruté doesn’t publish much because she doesn’t have to. One could argue that she has put off publishing because she simply doesn’t have time. One could argue that much of the recent criticism of her work, her orangutan rehabilitation, and her Dayak and volunteer staff stems from personal and professional jealousies—“because I stuck it out and [other primatologists] didn’t, there must be something wrong with my work,” as Biruté puts it.
But the bottom line, as with Jane and Dian, is that science is not her top priority. Science was the reason she first went into the field, but science is no longer what keeps her here.