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Galdikas on the October 1975 cover of National Geographic<\/p>\nIn the early 1970s, Birut\u00e9 Galdikas and Rod Brindamour, then her husband, often awoke to find \u201cnot one, but four orangutans in bed with us\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Little in their bark-walled hut in the Borneo jungle \u2014 an old shelter for illegal loggers that Galdikas turned into a rehabilitation camp for orangutans \u2014 was safe from consumption. The primates devoured flashbulbs, fountain pens, tubes of toothpaste, candles, binoculars and bottles of shampoo. Mosquito nets were carried into the trees for bedding. Galdikas often found old socks floating in her morning coffee, umbrellas nestled high up in the canopy or a pair of monkeys sitting on her bed spraying milk at each other. One young orangutan got into the unfortunate habit of dumping bowls of salt into her tea. \u201cI was sometimes convinced that they were using their high ape intelligence to maximum capacity,\u201d she reflected, \u201cjust thinking up new ways of driving me crazy.\u201d <\/p>\n
Galdikas and Brindamour eventually moved into an \u201corangutan-proof\u201d wooden house nearby. It took Sugito \u2014 Galdikas\u2019s first adoptive orangutan, with whom she had an \u201cendearing but claustrophobic relationship\u201d that involved changing the sheets when he wet the bed \u2014 two minutes to solve the puzzle. \u201cHe dragged a stick to the nearest window, leant it against the wall and climbed right up,\u201d recalled Galdikas in National Geographic in October 1975, in a feature that brought orangutans \u2014 the only great ape found in Asia \u2014 international attention for the first time. On the cover, in a photograph taken by Brindamour, Galdikas holds a young orangutan on her hip like a child, one furry arm curled around her neck protectively.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Galdikas on the October 1975 cover of National Geographic<\/p>\n
Over a 50-year period, Galdikas conducted the longest study by one scientist of any wild mammal in the world in Tanjung Puting, a national park nestled in the heart of Indonesian Borneo where approximately\u00a090 per cent of the world\u2019s orangutans live. She was the world\u2019s foremost expert on the primate but when Galdikas began her study in 1971 little was known about them. Were orangutans solitary or social? Did they prefer to eat leaves or fruit? Were they genetically similar to humans, like chimpanzees or gorillas?<\/p>\n
Galdikas\u2019s study was funded by Dr Louis Leakey, the pioneering Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist who sought to understand the similarities between humans and the great apes by sending three female primatologists to observe them in their natural habitat (Leakey believed women to possess greater patience and powers of observation than men, and they were less threatening to male primates).<\/p>\n
In 1960 he sent Jane Goodall to study chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania; six years later Dian Fossey flew to Rwanda to observe mountain gorillas. <\/p>\n
If Goodall revealed how remarkably similar chimpanzees were to humans, Fossey how surprisingly gentle and family-orientated the gorilla was, then Galdikas discovered that, of the three apes, the orangutan (which in Malay means \u201cperson of the forest\u201d) was the most genetically distant from humans. They are solitary creatures but the bond between a mother and infant is one of the most intense of any animal; she discovered that orangutans had the longest birth interval of any land mammal \u2014 roughly every eight years, which makes them particularly susceptible to extinction \u2014 and a sophisticated spatial memory to support a diet of fruits scattered across the forest. Galdikas identified some 400 species of plant consumed by the primate and argued that by distributing the seeds of the larger plants through the act of digestion, orangutans acted as vital \u201cgardeners of the forest\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Galdikas and her first husband Rod Brindamour, a wildlife photographer, in 1978 with a poster from a zooDenver Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Of the so-called Leakey\u2019s Angels (or the \u201cTrimates\u201d, as Leakey nicknamed them) Galdikas was the least well-known \u2014 she reckoned because \u201cI have a name nobody can pronounce and because I\u2019ve been in Borneo all these years, tracking an elusive and solitary animal\u2019\u2019.<\/p>\n
What would become Camp Leakey, which Galdikas named after her mentor, was at the start a forest with no telephones, roads or electricity. She was told by professors back in America that her mission couldn\u2019t be done \u2014 that orangutans were too elusive and wary of humans to be closely observed, that they lived in deep swamps in a forest controlled by illegal loggers and hunters.<\/p>\n
Yet Galdikas, like Fossey and Goodall, had a steely determination and courage that changed the perception of what women could achieve in inhospitable environments. Every day she rose at dawn and ventured into the jungle, often alone, to search for the wild primates. As she walked, Galdikas listened. \u201cThe wild orangutans sometimes disclose their presence by the snap of a twig or the regular dropping of fruit stones as they eat,\u201d she wrote, \u201csometimes by the crashing of branches as they move through the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes it took weeks to find them \u2014 as Goodall observed, \u201ccompiling data on the animals was considerably tougher for Birut\u00e9\u00a0than for me. Chimps are very sociable. It might take her a year to see what I can observe in one lucky day\u201d \u2014 and Galdikas had \u201cclose encounters\u201d with adult male orangutans including several who charged her. The humidity of the forest was often unbearable and the swamps, swollen by rains, regularly impassable. Leeches fell out of their socks and \u201csquirmed in our underwear\u201d. <\/p>\n
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Galdikas in the forest, 1965Universal Archive\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Galdikas grew very thin because she didn\u2019t want to carry the extra weight of food on her excursions, and she survived on a breakfast of rice and canned sardines with only black coffee for the jungle.\u00a0\u201cDays were spent in the swamps, up to our armpits in black acidic water, searching for wild orangutans and following them wherever we found them,\u201d she recalled. \u201cInsect bites that led to inflamed sores, malaria, and mysterious fevers were very common occurrences. Once my hand was so swollen from insect bites that I couldn\u2019t move my fingers. Another time a centipede bit me on the face and my face swelled up so much that I looked like an old potato.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Galdikas learnt about the orangutan, she began giving talks \u201cto anyone who would listen. I told them about orangutans\u2019 intelligence, their emotions and their role in the forest\u201d \u2014 and she turned Camp Leakey into what she called a \u201chalfway house\u201d through which young orangutans, accustomed to captivity, could return to their natural life in the forest. <\/p>\n
Like Fossey and Goddall, Galdikas became a surrogate mother figure to the primates, whom she once called \u201camong my best friends\u201d. There was one orangutan who would \u201cknock\u201d on her door and \u201cwe would sit on my porch\u201d, she said, \u201csometimes for hours\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Birut\u00e9 Marija Filomena Galdikas was born in 1946 in Germany, as her parents were fleeing Soviet occupation in their homeland of Lithuania. They ended up in Toronto, Canada, where her father, Antanas Galdikas, was a house painter and her mother, Filomena (n\u00e9e Slapsis), a nurse.<\/p>\n
Birut\u00e9 decided that she wanted to be an explorer after reading Curious George, the children\u2019s book about a monkey\u2019s friendship with \u201cThe Man with the Yellow Hat\u201d. She wrote to a museum director in Borneo whose wife kept orangutans and sent letters to the newly independent nation of Malaysia in the hopes she would be permitted to study them.<\/p>\n
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Galdikas, left, helps to return baby orangutans to Borneo after they were taken by smugglers and found in a crate at Bangkok airport in 2017 <\/p>\n
Her letters went unanswered, but Galdikas\u2019s chance came in 1964 when the family moved to America and she studied natural sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, completing a master\u2019s degree in anthropology in 1969. It was there that the 22-year-old first met Leakey, who was giving a lecture on archaeological dating techniques. She recalled that he had lost most of his teeth, couldn\u2019t walk without a cane and seemed initially uninterested in her passion for orangutans, but after some persuading Leakey agreed to obtain permits and funding as he had done with Goodall and Fossey, and on November 6, 1971, Galdikas was on a plane bound for Borneo.<\/p>\n
In the late 1970s Galdikas and Brindamour divorced and she married Pak Bohap, a local Bornean who worked as a research assistant at Camp Leakey, in 1981. He predeceased her in 2022 and she is survived by their son and daughter, Jane and Frederick, as well as a son from her first marriage, Binti. All grew up in the rainforest.<\/p>\n
In the 1980s Galdikas taught at universities in Canada and New Mexico, went \u201con tour\u201d with Goodall and Fossey lecturing across North America and stepped back from jungle work to focus on conservation as the discovery of gold in and around the park flooded the area with open-pit mines and the exotic pet trade continued to flourish. When six infant orangutans were seized at Bangkok airport en route to the former Yugoslavia in 1990, the Indonesian government asked Galdikas to negotiate their return. They travelled home with her to Camp Leakey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Filming at Tanjung Puting Orangutan Rehabilitation CentreAlamy<\/p>\n
In 1993 Galdikas was presented with a United Nations environmental achievement award and met the American vice-president Al Gore, who added his voice to calls for orangutan conservation. She helped to designate Tanjung Puting a national park in 1982, set up the Orangutan Foundation International four years later with the American lawyer John Beal and wrote four books including Orangutan Odyssey (1999) and her autobiography, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo (1995). <\/p>\n
Yet in later years, the Indonesian government grew wary of Galdikas\u2019s campaigning. When she tried to renew her research permit in the 1990s, an official allegedly told her \u201c20 years is enough\u201d and several primatologists began to question her rehabilitation methods, in particular her close proximity to the orangutans: they argued that it impaired her scientific objectivity and led to the potential transmission of interspecies diseases. Some funders withdrew support, though Galdikas saw this as a warning from the loggers from whom she had received death threats. <\/p>\n
Recent visitors to Camp Leakey reported that it was in disarray and when Galdikas returned in 2024, the orangutan population had dwindled to about 100,000, less than half of what it was a century ago.\u00a0She continued to campaign for orangutans from her hospital bed after having lung cancer diagnosed, probably exacerbated by her efforts to combat wildfires in Borneo. <\/p>\n
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In Borneo in 2000 with an orphan at the Orangutan Foundation International Care CentreAlex Pitt\/ZUMAPRESS.com\/ALAMY<\/p>\n