![]() ![]() At the same time, she seemed like a very emotional person, almost too emotional.”įor Harcourt, these first impressions in the field never really changed. “Basically, she appeared to fear nothing and was not going to take any nonsense from anyone. “She was also a bit scary, exuding a determined, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude towards poachers, cattle in the Park illegally (of which there were many at that time), and any ‘students’ who didn’t dedicate themselves 100% to the good of Karisoke,” Harcourt recalls. But she sensed a dark undercurrent in Fossey’s character. “When I got to Rwanda, Dian was extremely warm, welcoming and encouraging,” says Harcourt. Harcourt describes Fossey at the time as genial but formal and serious “and not exactly encouraging about my coming to Karisoke” (ironically, Fossey thought ‘girls’ were weak and not for the kind of fieldwork that was required). She said yes and I went to Rwanda in 1973 three weeks after graduating from Stanford.” So I wrote to Dian Fossey and asked her if I could come to Karisoke and do anything she needed me to do. “After the first charge by the silverback my fate was further defined and I knew I wanted to study wild gorillas,” Harcourt recalled. At Kahuzi-Biega National Park, Adrien Deschryver, a Belgian photographer and conservationists who had established the park, habituated one group of gorillas. Harcourt was holidaying in the Congo with her mother, Gloria McLean, an animal rights activist, and sister Judy. Her love for gorillas began following a close encounter with eastern lowland gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri) in the Congo. In the late 1960s, Harcourt, daughter of Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart, became a student of Fossey at Karisoke (she spent her summer holidays from Stanford University excavating fossils at Lake Rudolph, now Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya with Richard Leakey). In late 1967, when political crisis in the Congo forced Fossey to relocate her fieldwork to Rwanda, she established the Karisoke Research Station on the foothills of Mt.Visoke, a cold, muddy and dark volcano that rises 3,000 meters into the mist.Īmerican primatologist Kelly Stewart Harcourt knew Fossey well at the time. Congo side of Parc National des Virunga, which resulted in the publication of The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior. In 1959, the legendary American naturalist George Schaller began a year’s natural history study on the D. For almost two decades, she undertook an extensive study of mountain gorillas at the Karisoke Research Station, the longest of any field naturalist.įossey wasn’t the first to study mountain gorillas in the field. In the early morning hours of 27th December 1985, Dian Fossey, by then one of the world’s celebrated naturalist and bestselling author of Gorillas in the Mist was brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on the slopes of the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda’s northern Ruhengeri Province.įossey was recognized as the world's leading authority on the physiology and behavior of the rare and critically endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei)-one of our closet living relatives. This year also marks the eighty-fifth anniversary of her birth. In spite of her complex personality, Fossey gave her life in order to protect one of humanity’s closest living relatives. She went on to make ground-breaking discoveries about gorillas including how females transfer from group to group over the decades, gorilla vocalisation, hierarchies and social relationships among groups, rare infanticide, gorilla diet, and how gorillas recycle nutrients. For almost two decades, she single-handedly pioneered the study of the rare and critically endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei). Half a century ago, the controversial American primatologist Dian Fossey established her field camp in the midst of two volcanoes in Rwanda.
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