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In late December 1985, a worker opened the door to a remote cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda and encountered a horrific scene: Gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, whose aggressive approach to conservation had pitted her against the local community, had been hacked to death with a machete, and her cabin had been ransacked.
Fossey had been working with an endangered gorilla population in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park since the late 1960s. Along with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, she was one of the three “trimates” chosen by Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural habitat.
Fossey had no formal training in ethology, the science of animal behavior, when she set out for Africa. She began her field work in Kabara, Congo, living in a tiny tent and venturing out to study mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) there. After civil war broke out in 1967, she escaped to the Rwandan portion of the mountains and set up a new research project near Mount Karisimbi in Rwanda.
Fossey was inspired by the work of George Schaller, a biologist who, in 1959, had also studied the gorillas of the Virunga Mountains.
“I knew that animals try to stay out of your way. If you go quietly near them, they come to accept your presence. That’s what I did with gorillas. I just went near them day after day, which was fairly easy because they form cohesive social groups. Soon, I knew them as individuals, both their faces and their behavior, and I just sat and watched them,” Schaller said in a 2006 interview.
Fossey operated on this same principle of patient, unobtrusive observation. Still, the gorillas initially fled from her, and she spent hours tracking and trailing them across the misty forest.
After a year, they stopped fleeing at her presence and started beating their chests and vocalizing. It was a bluff meant to scare her off, but it was still far from their ordinary, natural behavior, she said in a 1973 lecture. After two years, she received two young gorillas, Coco and Pucker; rehabilitated them; and learned about gorilla young by observing them.
“I came to know the gorillas’ need for love and affection, and the young gorillas’ need for constant play,” she said.
It would take three years before the gorillas came to accept her presence and reveal more naturalistic behavior, she said in the lecture.
During her decades in Virunga, Fossey described and learned to mimic the vocalizations of gorillas, including the “belch vocalization” that signifies contentment. She also elucidated their tight-knit family structures, courtship and mating rituals, as well as documented the occasional murder of infant gorillas by rival males.
Although she would eventually earn her doctorate in zoology from the University of Cambridge, Fossey spent her first years studying the gorillas with no formal training. Perhaps because of her initial lack of training, she formed close bonds with individual animals and tended to ascribe more humanlike motivations and descriptions to their actions than is typically accepted in formal zoology. She often described gorillas as more altruistic than humans.
“You take these fine, regal animals,” she told an interviewer, as reported by The New York Times. ”How many fathers have the same sense of paternity? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is unbelievably strong.”
She formed a particularly close bond with a gorilla she nicknamed Digit — so named for his damaged finger — who did not have playmates his age. Digit was killed by poachers in 1977.
The last years of Fossey’s life were increasingly focused on conserving the gorillas’ dwindling habitat and combating poachers. She used confrontational methods, such as burning snares, wearing masks to scare poachers, and spray-painting cattle to prevent herders from bringing them into the national park, according to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
She also shot over the heads of tourists to scare them away and told her graduate students to carry guns, according to The Washington Post.
Given that many of the people living on the fringes of the park lived in poverty and resorted to expansion and herding to survive, this did not earn her good will with many of the locals.
Fossey’s murder was never solved. Many think poachers were responsible for the killing, but other theories have been floated as well.
