Primate researchers Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas changed the way science looks at the great apes by studying the animals as individuals, says the author of a book about the three women.
Sy Montgomery will be in Chicago this week to talk about these women, the subjects of her first book, ”Walking with the Great Apes” (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95). Work on the book took the writer and environmental journalist, based in Hancock, N.H., across Africa, Asia and Europe in pursuit of the research camps of three women she calls childhood heroines.
Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas were selected to do field research by the late paleontologist Louis S.B. Leakey, who preferred to send women into the field, said Montgomery, 34. Neither Goodall nor Fossey had worked in primatology, Montgomery said, before they went into the field-Goodall in Tanzania, Fossey in Rwanda in the 1960s. Goodall had worked as a waitress to earn money to travel to Africa; Fossey had been an occupational therapist. Galdikas was an anthropologist before she went to work in Indonesia; Leakey helped her obtain financing for her studies.
”It`s no accident these were all women,” Montgomery said. ”Leakey believed that women were more observant, more tenacious and tougher than men and that they noticed details that men would not.”
Goodall`s earliest ape studies were rejected by the scientific community because, among other things, she named the chimpanzees she studied, and researchers before her had only numbered the animals. Goodall`s methods later became accepted practice.
To research her book, Montgomery visited the women`s camps and interviewed Galdikas, a Canadian who now lives in Indonesia, and Goodall, a Briton who lives in Tanzania and England. Although she met Fossey a decade ago, Montgomery did not interview her before she died in 1985 in Africa.
Montgomery said the women became deeply involved in animal conservation;
Fossey is believed to have been murdered by poachers. Goodall now spends much of her time traveling to talk to audiences about chimpanzee conservation;
Galdikas, who is married to an Indonesian, works for animal conservation within the Indonesian culture, Montgomery said.
Montgomery was motivated to write her book after she spent time living in a tent in the Australian Outback studying the emu, a species of large flightless birds native to Australia.
Montgomery will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Brookfield Zoo, 3300 Golf Rd., Brookfield, the South Gate entrance. Tickets are $6 for zoo members, $10 non-members. Call 708-485-0263, ext. 355 for information.
