Jane Goodall, page 29
Or this entry from September 13: “The call was two two-syllable sounds: ‘Ooh-huh ooh-huh’—i.e., low hooting call. At 7.30 the above sound was repeated, then louder 3 times, & low again for another 2. At 8.15, a rather high pitched series of scream-like calls ‘ooah-ooah whah-whah’—repeated several times.”
She described and analyzed how the chimpanzees moved. September 8: “It was very steep, & they all went rather fast, using a movement that was almost like the ‘crutch walk’ but consisted of moving both arms forward together & then bringing the legs forward together. As they touched the ground, the arms moved off again, giving a ‘bounding’ effect.”
She gathered as much data as possible on what they ate, starting with collecting—and tasting—samples of things she had seen them eat. September 20: “Inside the case, which is thick & hard, is an acorn-like nut encased in bright pink oily fibres. These taste rather like the palm nuts. The nut, which is also oily, has the most unpleasant, bitter pungent taste—I could not get rid of it for a long time.” October 15: “The place where they stayed so long was where a new type of berry was growing—fruit I should say. Round & purple with a small stone. Also the tree with the yellow flowers—there were no flowers so they were eating shoots.” And Jane continued collecting and examining whatever she could find from the other end. September 18: “The feces were dry, dark brown, and fibrous. Contained many stones from a small purplish fruit. We opened one of these small stones & found it oily. Also several brown nuts, looking rather like peeled acorns, & of the type which we had noticed along the Linda River the day before. They are the inside of a hard case.”
She described where the chimpanzees slept, in arboreal nests, and watched how they constructed those nests. September 9:
After this we were lucky enough to see a chimp making its nest. It was not close, unfortunately, & we could not tell which sex. But it squatted in a leafy tree, near the top. It then rapidly pulled small leafy branches towards it, from each direction, treading on them to hold them in place. It then sat down for a moment: stood up & pulled off a branch from higher up which it incorporated into the nest. This it did 4 times, with about ½ minute between each picking. It then lay down, hardly visible. Another couple of minutes & it reached out & picked a very small bunch of leaves which it appeared to place under its head. Then it stretched right out so that its feet projected beyond the structure of the nest.
And eventually (on November 18) she tried stretching right out in one of those nests for herself: “Very comfortable & springy indeed.”
She was intrigued by the imaginative and apparently happy play of young chimps. As recorded on October 26: “They had their mouths open—the chimp laugh—tickling each other? Only twice during 45 mins of play did I hear a sound. Once a small scream—(Ahah ahah ahah). When 2 were wrestling. Often they dropped, still gripping each other. And on one occasion I heard a soft panting ‘hoo-e-hoo-e-hoo.’” And October 27: “The child amused itself quietly: climbed up the tall thick branch above its mother, crawled along underneath where it bent over at the top, hung down by its arms, or one arm, kicking its legs. Turned upside down. For some time it climbed around with a sprig of leaves clasped in its left leg where the knee bends. Often it reached down, hanging by one arm and leg, and patted its mother’s head or the leaves.”
She was curious about the obviously close, affectionate relationships between mothers and young offspring, as evidenced, for example, during the following moment on September 22: “After eating two fruits—all of which, incidentally, were picked by hand from the tree—right or left apparantly impartially—the mother reached out—right arm, and picked up her child. She held it to her breast—in exactly human fashion—right hand behind its shoulders, left cradling it, & for about 5 minutes it suckled—from left breast only.”
She was fascinated by the occasional tense and complex encounters between species—between chimps and baboons, for instance, as on September 14:
At 2.30 we suddenly saw 4 adult chimps—certainly 2 large males, and almost certainly 2 females, surrounded by a troop of baboons. All at once several of the baboons ran forward, and the chimps also ran forward. It looked as though they were being chased. The two smaller ones climbed right up two small trees. The large male in the front stopped near a tree for a moment, and the one behind climbed a few feet up a tree, paused, climbed down, and suddenly rushed after the baboons near him. The other large male followed his example, turning on his tormentors, & running for several yards on his hind legs. There was quite a lot of noise—hard to sort out. The low grunting, growling noise of the chimp, mixed with the barks of baboons and one screaming.
One hundred sixty chimpanzees inhabited the full reserve, but in the valleys and hills just beyond Jane’s camp there lived only four or five dozen apes altogether—few enough that, as they were becoming familiar with her, Jane could reasonably anticipate learning to recognize individuals on sight. But it was hard to make out distinctive individual features. For one thing, she was still watching most of the time from a considerable distance. Moreover, because of limited funds, her binoculars were second-rate, and thus she was often left squinting unproductively into a chromatic blur. On September 5, though, Jane made a routine trip into Kigoma and found that the British district officer, a man named Michael Beardmore, had a much better pair of field glasses, which he generously lent her. They were of German manufacture, “very small & light, 7 X 25, special for bird watching. Vast improvement. First class.”
In any event, the difficult process of making identifications took months, as Jane continued to watch and carefully describe her subjects, noting whenever possible any distinguishing marks. The following methodical description of a mother and her infant, entered in the journal on October 24, gives a taste of the problem and process:
She was dark faced & a little grizzled. Small bald V. Dark mark on left side of her face, behind & below eye. She was keeping mostly in the same place, reaching out—either hand—& pulling the sprays towards her, picking off fruit with lips. Her breasts were not noticeably large, nor were the nipples. I find a note that her face & hands gave a “grey” impression, rather than black. The infant very small & very pale faced. Large white rump patch. White mark on top of head, left side. (Thank god for a distinguishing mark at last!)
But with the new, hardworking, skilled, and motivated field staff, with the increasingly comfortable familiarity between observer and observed, and with the improved field glasses, Jane was slowly beginning to make out distinctive features and marks and to conclude that she could recognize a few individuals. And by September 12 she was confident enough to begin tentatively trying out some names. As she wrote less tentatively a few days later, in a letter to the family, “But my chimps are so lovely now. I know where to find them, I know some of them by sight. I know the hideous Sophie with her son, Sophocles. I know the bearded grizzled old Claud, and an almost bald old lady who, I think, must be Annie. They are getting used to us.”
By the second half of September, Jane had surpassed the number of days—sixty-four—spent in active fieldwork pursuing chimpanzees by her significant predecessor, Henry W. Nissen of Yale University, in 1930.
Nissen, with his gun and grass fires and club-wielding African helpers, with his aggressive and ultimately blundering approach to the problem of studying wild chimpanzees, never thought of the species as a collection of individuals with individual personalities. He preferred instead to conceptualize the species as a biological monolith, a simplistically coherent unit about which simple and definite laws of behavior might readily be deduced, such as “the chimpanzee likes company,” “the chimpanzee is nomadic,” “the wild chimpanzee is an early riser.” And yet nothing Jane had done or seen so far actively contradicted or overtly surpassed Nissen’s general conclusions about the apes: that chimpanzee group size varies substantially; that they wander a lot, seek out a variety of fruits and berries and other vegetable matter to eat, rest during the midday heat, build tree nests in the evening to sleep in, and so on. In most ways, she was that summer and autumn still busily confirming the general conclusions of her scientific predecessor.
Then George Schaller showed up.
George Schaller—tall and lean, clean-cut and good-looking, poised, very smart—had been a graduate student in zoology at the University of Wisconsin when, in January 1957, Professor John Emlen asked him if he would consider something bigger and hairier than birds, his chief interest, since the National Academy of Sciences was looking to fund field research on wild gorillas. Schaller impetuously agreed to give up birds in favor of gorillas and immediately set about reading everything he could on the latter, thus quickly discovering how very little anyone knew.
Schaller reviewed nineteenth-century exploration and hunting narratives, Carl Akeley’s accounts of killing gorillas for science and regretting it, and Harold C. Bingham’s brief monograph describing his unsatisfactory 1929 expedition, in which the anxious researcher shot a gorilla. He eagerly awaited the latest reports from Uganda by Rosalie Osborn and Jill Donisthorpe, those two courageous if untrained enthusiasts supported by Walter Baumgartel of the Travellers Rest hotel. Rosalie Osborn had observed mountain gorillas in the Ugandan Virungas between October 1956 and January 1957; Jill Donisthorpe had continued that work until September 1957. But when their typed reports finally arrived in Wisconsin, the young George Schaller found himself, as he has written, “truly depressed.” He clarified: “Here someone had made a serious attempt to study gorillas for a whole year, but the amount of concrete information about the behavior of the apes which these investigators obtained was minute.”
Schaller and his wife, Kay, accompanied by John Emlen and his wife, Jinny, arrived in East Africa in February 1959, and over the next six months the two men proceeded to conduct a general survey of mountain gorilla distribution—a very ambitious task at the time, partly because their definition of “mountain gorilla” included the thousands of apes we would today identify as eastern lowland gorillas. Once the survey was finished, in August, John and Jinny Emlen went home, while George and Kay Schaller hiked into the Belgian Congo portion of the Virunga volcanoes and set up housekeeping in a teetering, tin-roofed, three-windowed cabin at Kabara meadow in Albert National Park. As it happened, Kabara was the very place where the reformed specimen collector and taxidermist Carl Akeley had camped out in 1926, seriously ill but gamely intending to study gorillas. From that failed attempt, a simple flat marker—Akeley’s tombstone—remained, weathering at the edge of the meadow.
Kay Schaller took on the essential tasks of support, maintenance, and logistics in their mountain cabin, while George spent his days wandering, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of a park guard, through the damp and chilly volcanic forests, looking for gorillas. And finding them.
Like Jane, George Schaller developed a technique of approaching the apes by appearing openly if unobtrusively and projecting himself as a quiet, nonthreatening presence, hoping that their curiosity would overcome their fear. He walked slowly, tried to seem boring, never carried a gun, and avoided as much as possible staring directly at his subjects. Like Jane, he found the apes “more annoyed and excited on seeing two persons than one,” so when he went out with one of the park guards, he would ask the guard to withdraw when they found gorillas. Like Jane, he understood that the puzzle of the species as a collective could best be solved through understanding, and therefore recognizing, individuals. Like Jane, he intuitively thought of his subjects as sentient creatures with humanlike emotions, and again like Jane, he gave them names that sometimes mnemonically identified their appearance but also marked them as distinctive personalities: Big Daddy (“easily recognizable by the two bright silver spots on his gray back”), D.J. (“the striving executive type who had not yet reached the top”), the Outsider (“roamed slowly around the periphery of the group”), Splitnose, Junior, Mrs. September, Mrs. Bad-eye, Mrs. Greyhead, Max, Moritz, and so on.
George Schaller’s gorilla work in the Virungas was a spectacular breakthrough, arguably the first intimate scientific study of wild apes, and he was therefore almost uniquely qualified to understand and advise Jane as she labored in isolation at Gombe. His original plan had been to study gorillas for eighteen months following the population survey, which would have kept him and Kay in the cabin at Kabara until February 1961. But the same political storm in the Belgian Congo that had delayed the start of Jane’s research in mid-July 1960 prematurely precipitated the end of his, and the Schallers wisely left their cabin and crossed the border into Uganda, where Kay moved into a women’s dorm at Makerere College in Kampala while George did a couple more months’ worth of gorilla work in southwestern Uganda.
Louis Leakey contacted George by telegram that September, just as he was finishing up, and asked him to stop at the Coryndon Museum when he was next in Nairobi. As Kay Schaller recently recalled, they finally located Louis in his office, sitting behind his desk and “looking very biggely-browed and grumpy.” The white-haired curator “looked up at us as if we were the most unwelcome people in this world,” but then, “as soon as George said who he was, he was just extremely kind.”
George Schaller remembers “a rather bulky man full of enthusiasm and dressed in a sort of jumpsuit and delightedly showing me some fossils that he had found. In my ignorance, I could not have appreciated them enough, but I greatly liked his enthusiasm for things.” In any event, Louis soon persuaded them that they must go see that Jane Goodall person and the chimpanzees she was watching in Tanganyika, and thus the Schallers drove their Volkswagen bus from Nairobi to Kigoma and established themselves by Saturday, October 8, 1960, at the Regina Hotel.
On Thursday, Jane had received a telegram from Louis, informing her that the Schallers would arrive in Kigoma in two days. So she took the boat into town on Friday, had a skin infection on her leg attended to at the Kigoma hospital, and, the day after, met George and Kay Schaller at their hotel for tea. As Jane noted laconically in her field journal, “Very favourably impressed by them.”
Jane and the Schallers returned to Gombe on a hired boat that Sunday, arriving at noon, and after lunch at the camp, Kay and Vanne visited while Jane and George set off up the mountain to find chimps. Unfortunately, they were nowhere to be seen. Some hooting cries and calls from somewhere down in one of the forest pockets—that was it. They returned to camp early and “had a very pleasant and interesting evening,” according to the journal. The next day was “still unlucky” in a chimp-finding sense, even though Jane took her guest “all round the usual haunts.” Still no chimps. “But I learnt a great deal from him, & we had some very interesting conversations,” not to mention “another extremely pleasant evening.” The Schallers took a boat back to Kigoma the next morning, October 11.
George and Kay Schaller recall only a few faint details from that long-ago visit to Gombe. Kay recollects liking Vanne: “She and I started talking a lot during the day while Jane and George were up on the trail, and I’ve admired her ever since.” George remembers Jane as a “quiet, attractive girl” who, as he learned very quickly, “was good at climbing hills and very determined to get on with her work.” He was also surprised by the brevity of the project—only four months—and by the pathetic inadequacy of her equipment, including the borrowed and still not very good binoculars, nonexistent telescope, and bad camera. With a decent grant, he thought then, she would be able to get more information; and he left her the small gift of a polythene sheet to use as a quick shelter from the rain while looking for chimps.
Precisely what their “very interesting conversations” consisted of, Jane never wrote down, but in any event she was most certainly upset because her chimpanzee study was drawing to a close. She was afraid of failure and of disappointing Louis. And what had she done so far to justify further funding, a longer study, more support, more time in the field? In a letter to the family back home, she mentioned the Schallers’ visit and noted that it was “really nice to talk to someone who really understood what I was doing, & why, & who didn’t think I was completely crazy.” And she summarized what may have been George Schaller’s most important comment: “George said he thought that if I could see chimps eating meat, or using a tool, a whole year’s work would be justified.”
Schaller’s year of close gorilla observations had confirmed that those apes ate a highly fibrous vegetarian diet: typically, the ground-level plants they wandered through. Chimpanzees, most everyone seemed to agree, favored a rarer and richer vegetarian diet that focused on fruits and berries and nuts. Indeed, the chimp diet seemed not very different from a human diet, with the very important exception that the hairy apes were not supposed to be hunters or meat-eaters. Nissen had described dozens of vegetable items that appeared on the menu of the chimpanzees he studied, but no meat. Chimpanzees, like gorillas, were vegetarians.
At least that was the consensus, although Schaller smartly recognized that no one actually knew for certain. And Jane, now alerted to the possibility of a hidden, carnivorous aspect to her apes, was perhaps more than usually attentive when, around 7:40 in the morning of October 30, a Sunday, she sat next to Short on the Peak and witnessed, through her binoculars, a wild drama in the trees below. It was hard to make out what was going on, since the foliage was very dense in that particular spot, but she steadied her glasses onto a violent boiling in the branches, listened to some “angry little screams,” as she wrote in the field journal, and finally made out three chimps, one of whom was holding “something which looked pink.”
