Introduction

 This essay is an overview of the  study of wild mountain gorillas in Africa in the mid-20th century. Central African nations were struggling to decolonize, and female scientists (almost all Western) were struggling for recognition. The contributions of four women who observed wild gorillas between 1926 and 1957 are described in detail. Two of the women, Mary Akeley and Lucille Bingham, both Americans, were among the first non-African women ever to see mountain gorillas. They both worked in the shadows of their husbands, and both consequently got enmeshed in an aggressive, ineffective approach to observing gorillas. Akeley reported her experiences in a popular book; Bingham left the reporting to her husband.

The other two, Rosalie Osborn and Jill Donisthorpe, both British, were the first to publish scientific observations of the behavior and ecology of wild mountain gorillas in peer-reviewed scientific journals, in 1963 and 1958 respectively. They developed a more patient method of observation of these apes, which would be adopted and improved by subsequent gorilla researchers. However, these pioneering contributions, initially well-received, have been diminished, dismissed, and appropriated by subsequent, more glamorously sponsored researchers. Sexism, patriarchy, licentiousness, romantic jealousies, and professional competitiveness were involved.

Of course, Osborn and Donisthorpe are not alone. Scientists have for centuries systematically discriminated against other scientists on the basis of race, gender, sexual preference, class, geographical origin, and colonial subjugation (see Galpayage Dona and Chittka 2020, Haraway 1989 as sources especially relevant to the study of animal behavior). This essay is not a scholarly treatment of discrimination in primatology. It’s just an instructive story about power and prejudice in the study of great apes. My hope is to restore awareness of Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s insightful and courageous contributions to this history.  

Mary Jobe Akeley and Carl Akeley 

In 1921, Carl Akeley, head taxidermist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, shot and taxidermically mounted five wild mountain gorillas for an African exhibit at the museum. Akeley’s exhibit was to be 36 evocative and scientifically accurate dioramas (three-dimensional artistic recreations) of African animals. He returned to Africa in 1926 to collect more animals for the dioramas, and to photograph and document the site in the Virunga volcanoes where he had shot the gorillas. He was accompanied by his wife, Mary, landscape artists, illustrators, taxidermists, and a young Belgian ornithologist and cartographer, Jean-Marie Derscheid. 

Mary Jobe Akeley met Carl in 1920. He had been married to Delia Akeley, herself an accomplished naturalist. Carl divorced Delia in 1923, married Mary in 1924 when she was 46 and he 60, and the couple set off on the year-long Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition in 1926. 

Mary wrote a book about the expedition, titled Carl Akeley’s Africa, which was published in 1929. Mary wrote the book because Carl had died at age 62, after a short illness, just after their second wedding anniversary and three days after they had arrived at the gorilla killing site on an extinct volcano known as Mt. Mikeno. 

Mary was a mountaineer, explorer, teacher, and conservationist, with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in the humanities. She had been supportively overseeing the expedition’s logistics, but she assumed leadership upon Carl’s death. The sudden shift in her role is evident in her writing, at page 191 of the book. She did not ask for support from the expedition’s sponsors, and none was imposed.   

Her first task was construction of an 8 foot-deep tomb, cut from volcanic rock, lined with mahogany and metal, topped with a slab of concrete, and surrounded by a palisade of freshly cut trees. She later added a garden of native flowering plants. The African porters (as many as 60 at some times) did the digging, cutting, and carrying. Construction took seven days. Carl’s body was buried without post-mortem examination. 

Mary took up Carl’s work immediately after his burial. She supervised the documentation of the 1921 kill site, mastering her husband’s complicated cameras to photo-reference the area. She supervised the collection, documentation, and packing of leafy plants, branches, vines, mosses, and lichens for the diorama. She even collected a large gorilla nest that was meticulously deconstructed and transported back to New York. The taxidermists collected birds and other small animals, and the artists made splendid color panoramic paintings to inform the diorama background. Mary quietly and efficiently coordinated all the work and the camp support, in addition to completing Carl’s field work. She worked every day for seven weeks of unseasonable rain, hail, wind, and cold. She lost 30 pounds. But she completed Carl’s mission with steely devotion, and few expressions of grief or loss. 

The Belgian government funded Derscheid’s participation in the expedition. He was to map the area, which had been designated in1924 as Africa’s first national park by Belgium’s King Albert I. Ironically, despite having killed five gorillas there, Carl Akeley had urged the king to create a national park in this region of the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, now Democratic Republic of the Congo) to protect the gorillas. Derscheid was also charged with estimating the size and distribution of the mountain gorilla population and making a survey of local plants and animals. He worked for seven months in the park, during which he had 33 gorilla encounters. 

Mary saw gorillas six times as she worked in the forest, but noted that “the demands of [my] work did not give me the opportunity for the long and intimate study which my husband and I had both anticipated so keenly” (M. Akeley 1929, pg. 209). She, like her husband, was accompanied by a gun bearer when out of camp. 

Mary’s book contains a number of her and Derscheid’s then-novel observations about the gorillas. Derscheid estimated that there were between 450 and 650 gorillas in the Virungas. They lived in the forests on the sides of the volcanic mountains of the Virunga chain, between a “bamboo zone” at 7,500 feet and a “subalpine zone” of 12,000 feet elevation, within which, in Mary’s words, they travel “hither and thither” in search of food. Mary examined about 50 gorilla nests and Derscheid approximately 200. Almost all were built on the ground. They differentiated between night nests for sleeping and day nests for napping. They noted that the nests were used only once, and that the size of nests probably reflected the size of the occupant, i.e. smaller nests were made by juveniles. They identified only two plant species that were commonly eaten by gorillas. They supported Carl Akeley’s earlier conclusion that gorillas are quadrupedal (walk on all four limbs) except when displaying aggressively or chest-beating (which Derscheid thought was intended to get the attention of the group rather than to intimidate intruders). They also noted that male gorillas got progressively more grey or silver as they aged. Mary noticed that there were twice as many females as males in a group.  

Carl Akeley had used a hunter’s approach for observing gorillas: find their feces, old nests, and food remains; follow their trail; hide when the gorillas were located; and sneak up on them. Pursue and stalk them again when they moved on. He was always armed. But he had come to believe that gorillas were not ferocious but amiable and curious animals. They would vocalize and charge when taken by surprise by a human visitor, or when they felt that their young were threatened. Also, in Derscheid’s words, when they “are tracked and compelled to travel further than they wish to go, they may become tired and impatient and finally aggressive” (M. Akeley 1929, pg. 231). Akeley (after he had shot five gorillas in 1921) pled that “making the acquaintance of [gorillas] be done intelligently, taking every precaution against accidents such as might result in injury to one of the party or unnecessary shooting of a gorilla because of injudicious approach” (cited in M. Akeley 1929, pp. 246-247). 

Nonetheless, Derscheid wanted to see how close he could get to gorillas and he stalked them persistently, getting as close as 30 feet. One male became aggressive, and Derscheid felt it was necessary to shoot; the bullet grazed the gorilla’s shoulder and the gorilla fled. 

When the gorilla work was done, Mary walked for 20 miles over several days to get back to where they had left the expedition vehicles. Then (despite Carl’s earlier caution that it would be too heavy a job for her) she drove a large overloaded truck for 900 miles back to Kenya. 

Upon return to the U.S., Mary Akeley was named special advisor to the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. She continued to write, lecture, and fund-raise for the conservation of African wildlife. She did not remarry. Derscheid became the first director of the Albert National Park, and then a highly regarded aviculturist and college professor. He became a spy for Allied forces in WW II, was captured by the Nazis, and decapitated on order of Heinrich Himmler (Brien 1971). Carl Akeley’s grave was desecrated (probably in the 1950s, perhaps more than once), and decayed pieces of his body were taken as talismans by thieves hoping to acquire his fearlessness (Roebuck 1988).     

Lucille Forest Bingham and Harold Bingham        

Robert Yerkes, a founder of primatology, delegated Harold C. Bingham, a Yale psychologist, to conduct another field study of wild mountain gorillas, in the same general area as the Akeleys’, in September and October, 1929 (Bingham 1932). Bingham was assisted by his wife Lucille. Bingham also used the hunter’s approach, taken to an “injudicious” extreme. In stark noncompliance with Akeley’s warning (which Bingham had read), Bingham and several native guides (and a gun bearer) would find fresh signs of gorillas and then pursue them doggedly every day for two to four consecutive days. They conducted seven of these “trails” over two months. When they located a group of gorillas, they observed while hidden or approached with stealth: pursue-hide-stalk, follow relentlessly if they moved on. The gun bearer carried Harold’s Springfield .30 rifle and Lucille a Colt .44 pistol. 

Bingham’s ponderous report of this study is descriptive, anecdotal, and speculative, with little quantitative data or sample-collecting. The Binghams observed gorilla nests, including night nests for sleeping and day nests for resting and feeding. Some were built on the ground, others in trees. They “recorded” more than 500 night nests, realizing that they were built of branches and leaves found at the nest site (not transported to the site), and that the nests were never re-used and usually contained feces. They recognized that the number of nests built for one night could be used to estimate the size of a gorilla group, which they concluded ranged between 2 and 35 individuals. Each group appeared to be led by an adult silver-colored male. They speculated that groups might split and re-unite in fluid fashion and that the gorillas traveled in a “vagrant manner” (were not territorial).  They concluded that mountain gorillas do not eat meat and “are indifferent to” honey and berries. They named and photographed four commonly eaten plant species, and verbally described four vocalizations and chest-beating. They saw males throw leaves and branches in aggressive display but concluded that wild gorillas do not otherwise use tools. They concluded that gorillas don’t drink from standing water.

In September, after pursuing a group for two days and then sneaking up on them, Bingham suspected the gorillas were “on edge” and took the rifle from the gun bearer. Shortly thereafter, a male charged. The lead guide turned and ran. Bingham commanded Lucille to “get out of the way.” She dropped and rolled into a patch of wild carrots; it’s unclear if she drew her pistol. Harold shot and killed the charging ape. The expedition report contains an elaborate, defensive reconstruction of the shooting, with written depositions from those present (in which Lucille refers to her husband as “Mr. Bingham”). Memories had to be jogged since Bingham confesses that “[T]he incident involved responsibilities that temporarily interrupted exclusive scientific observations…” (Bingham 1932, pg. 52). The final judgement (rendered by the itchy-trigger-fingered shooter himself) was that this was “the gorilla that had to be stopped.” The team took a complete set of measurements of the huge dead male (ridiculously, with a 6-inch ruler, to the nearest 0.25”), and examined his teeth. 

Bingham himself appears to have been disappointed with the scientific productivity of the study, concluding with: “The day has evidently arrived … when thrills of gorilla hunting… are due for replacement with methodical and sustained study” (pg. 65). 

Bingham wrote the expedition report in the plural “we” but said that Lucille declined co-authorship. She seems to be the first non-African woman to be (nearly) trampled by a gorilla. Bingham’s “day for methodical study of mountain gorillas” arrived 27 years later.   

Rosalie Osborn and Louis Leakey                    

Walter Baumgartel, though born in Germany, served as an aerial photographer with the South African air force in North Africa in WW II. In 1955, he travelled to the juncture of the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Belgian Congo, lured by the prospect of a partnership in a rundown hotel, Travellers (sic) Rest (Baumgartel 1976). The Rest was in Uganda, then a British protectorate, at the edge of the Virunga volcanoes (now Mgahinga National Park), home to mountain gorillas. Baumgartel saw that the gorillas were endangered, and appears to have been the first to recognize that gorilla tourism could provide needed conservation funding. Of course gorilla tourism would also be good for business at the Rest, of which Baumgartel became the sole owner. His African guide, Roveni “Reuben” Rwanzagire, was a legendary expert on gorilla behavior and ecology. But even Reuben found it difficult to find and observe the gorillas. Baumgartel knew they had to be more predictable and accessible for tourism to succeed. He had read Akeley’s book and Bingham’s monograph, and knew that the hunter’s approach to gorilla observation was dangerous and ineffective. He proposed a trapper’s approach: bait the gorillas with irresistible food and watch them as they ate. He began to provide sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes, salt-licks and “other hopeful dainties” for the gorillas (Dart 1958, pg. 192) to attract them to places where tourists could see them. But gorillas are herbivores (vegetarians) and could easily find ample natural plant foods in the mountains. They were not drawn by Baumgartel’s dainties. Baumgartel then presciently reckoned that a scientist studying the gorillas could learn enough about their movements and behavior to lead tourists to them and could help the gorillas to learn to tolerate human observers. 

Early in 1956, Baumgartel wrote to Louis Leakey, an internationally recognized, Kenyan-born, Cambridge-educated, then-53 year-old paleoanthropologist, and curator at the Coryndon Memorial Museum in Nairobi (now the National Museums of Kenya). Baumgartel asked Leakey if he could recommend a scientist to study the Virunga gorillas, using Travellers Rest as a base camp. Leakey responded quickly and enthusiastically, recommending Rosalie Osborn, his secretary at Coryndon (Morell 1995, Newman 2013). Leakey would provide her with a salary and Baumgartel gave her room and board at the hotel.   

Leakey and Baumgartel give us a feel for gendered attitudes of the time in their correspondence: “I have found a suitable person for you,” Dr. Leakey wrote several weeks later, “provided you do not insist on having a man.”  “I [Baumgartel] replied that, while I thought it was a man’s job, I’d accept a female of the right sort.” (Baumgartel 1976, pg. 37). 

Osborn, “a Scottish lass of 22,” was Leakey’s lover as well as his secretary. Their relationship was widely known in London, where it had started in 1954, and in Nairobi. Leakey was planning to divorce his second wife, Mary, to be with Osborn. Mary, who was also Leakey’s colleague (and many say a more meticulous scholar) is said to have been planning to leave her husband. But their son had been seriously injured in a riding accident in mid-1956 and had pled with his father to stay with his mother. Leakey complied and the family reunited. But this left Leakey and Osborn in an awkward position at the museum. Osborn had to go. Studying gorillas in Uganda was a convenient solution. Osborn had no university education when she arrived at Travellers Rest in October of 1956. She had doubtlessly encountered descriptions of apes and the then-current vocabulary of primatology during her work with Leakey at the museum. She was bright, later earning a BA in 1962 and a master’s degree in 1965 from Cambridge University, and a second master’s from York University (Clifton 2015).   

The outcome of the Bingham study had only fueled the consensus that male gorillas were ferocious and would readily kill people. In 1956, some still believed that male gorillas kidnapped young women. Osborn was undaunted. Neither she nor her guides carried guns when they went looking for gorillas (firearms were prohibited by the game department). Today we take for granted that gorilla researchers don’t need to carry guns, but it was then unthinkable for a gorilla researcher to be unarmed. Osborn’s decision to proceed was a courageous leap in method and attitude. 

Osborn established that Baumgartel’s trapper’s method, baiting with food, was ineffective with mountain gorillas. She did follow gorilla trails, but was content to find and examine nests, food remains, tracks, and feces. She hid when she did have the opportunity to observe gorillas. She made no attempt to pursue them after a contact. The gorillas began to get used to her; a young male once calmly watched at close range as she ate her lunch. This was a breakthrough: the gorillas not only tolerated her but one had shown curiosity about her.    

Osborn stayed in Uganda until January 1957, having attempted to observe the gorillas on 42 separate days. With Reuben’s help, sometimes with hotel visitors, Osborn climbed into the mountains and stayed in a hut for several days and bitterly cold nights, making systematic notes on all of the animals encountered, and on gorilla foods, nests, and movements. She documented that gorillas defecate in their night nests, and she confirmed that the number of nightly nests reflected the number of gorillas in a group. She observed gorillas copulate. 

When Osborn’s mother learned that she was in Uganda working with gorillas, she (her mother) pronounced that “the feeding of baboons had to stop forthwith” (Baumgartel 1976, pg 39). Osborn duly returned to England, took a job at the British Museum in London, and began her studies at Cambridge. She published a paper on her gorilla work in the prestigious Proceedings of Symposia of the Zoological Society of London, but not until 1963. Osborn later visited Travellers Rest with her mother, and she climbed up into the Virungas to see the gorillas several more times. She ultimately settled in Kenya, where she enjoyed a long career in wildlife conservation and education, but never resumed primate research. She served on the board of the National Museums of Kenya. Osborn never married but adopted a Kenyan boy, Josphat Ngonyo, who today is executive director of the Africa Network for Animal Welfare.. 

Jill Donisthorpe

When Osborn had informed Baumgartel of her (actually her mother’s) intent to discontinue her research in the Virungas, he placed an advertisement for a successor in a Nairobi newspaper. He got many responses, including an application from Jill Donisthorpe, whom he assumed was a man (he blamed the mistake on being unfamiliar with English names). Baumgartel recalled that he “had described graphically a gorilla mating scene” in their correspondence and would “have treated the theme more delicately” if he had known that “Jill” was a woman. Nonetheless, Donisthorpe got the job. She wrote later that there were two reasons for a hiring a woman for such a job: the lack of funding for a proper salary, and “funny business” (quotes added).   

Donisthorpe, a British citizen in her late 20s, had been living in Nairobi when she read the advertisement, but there is no indication that she had ever met Louis Leakey. Emlen (1960) stated that Donisthorpe, like Osborn, had been associated with the Coryndon Museum when she was in Nairobi. Some later accounts stated (e.g. Galdikas 2008) or implied (Goodall 2015) that Donisthorpe, like Osborn, had been mentored by Leakey. But Hayes asserted that “Leakey had no idea who she was” (Hayes 1990, pg. 69) and, with no elaboration, Donisthorpe herself had bluntly declared in the acknowledgements of her 1961 book (Wordsworth 1961) that Leakey was not her sponsor. It was Raymond Dart, an Australian professor of anatomy at the University of Witwatersrand, who had rekindled Donisthorpe’s childhood interest in gorillas (she had been a fan of Tarzan books). Dart wanted to establish a gorilla research program in Uganda, and supported Donisthorpe’s work with a small salary. There was no hint of funny business in any of this. 

Donisthorpe came to Travellers Rest in late January 1957, with a Bachelor of Science degree from Bristol University. She had a one-week transition period with Osborn, and then led the study until the end of September 1957, which marked, with Osborn’s shift, one continuous year of research on the mountain gorillas. Donisthorpe spent 122 days at the study site, found tracks on 99 days, located gorilla groups on 41 occasions, and saw gorillas 30 times. She described 24 food plants, and provided verbal descriptions of eight vocalizations (Donisthorpe 1958). She came to recognize a few individuals and groups, and outlined the size and social structure of gorilla groups. She analyzed her data quickly and published her results in the August 1958 issue of the South Africa Journal of Science. Donisthorpe credited Osborn with conducting the first portion of the study, between October 1956 and January 1957, but she was unable to formally cite Osborn’s work because it had not yet been published. Osborn would reciprocally acknowledge Donisthorpe’s work and her colleagueship in the 1963 paper. Donisthorpe focused on the same topics as Osborn, but provided more extensive results, probably because her shift was of greater duration, and she was able to build on Osborn’s earlier work. Donisthorpe saw gorillas drink from standing water (Wordsworth 1961, pg. 88).     

Donisthorpe became a “globetrotter” (Newman 2013). She changed her last name to Wordsworth in 1958, published a book on an earlier hitchhiking jaunt through Africa in 1958, and wrote a popular book about her gorilla work in 1961. She returned to Travellers Rest several times (Newman 2013). In the early 60s, she organized ten observers in three groups to comb the original study area for a gorilla survey (Baumgartel 1976). She did not publish the survey results, but censuses of mountain gorillas are now conducted regularly. Otherwise, Donisthorpe did not resume field work with gorillas or any other animal. About gorillas, she reflected that “I didn’t like them, and they didn’t like me…” (1961, pg. 11), although she did express admiration for one uncommonly large and demonstrative adult male, “The Saza Chief.”  

Baumgartel (1976) reported that this “gorilla-girl” (this essay’s title is borrowed from Baumgartel) met gorillas almost every day and was an intrepid observer. He recalled that Donisthorpe felt that it “was wrong psychologically to track these touchy animals by stealth, avoiding all noise. One should approach them openly and naturally.” (pg. 74). Like Osborn, Donisthorpe was unarmed. She stood her ground in the face of two terrifying display charges by adult males. Donisthorpe also recommended discontinuing observations when the gorillas moved on after a contact. She reasoned that further pursuit would be harassing.   

There is no account of Baumgartel ever exploiting or behaving disrespectfully toward the gorilla girls. He even parodied the situation when Osborn’s mother demanded that she stop her research. He wrote: “How could a young girl of good family live unchaperoned with a bachelor – a Continental one at that – running a pub in darkest Africa! What could the girl be thinking of!” (1976, pg. 39). Despite expressing a few eye-rolling gender stereotypes of the late 50s, Baumgartel guided and supported these two young women as they made scientific history. 

Gorilla Boys

Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s success and Baumgartel’s hospitality attracted other scientists, all men, to the Uganda side of the Virungas between 1957 and 1959. Raymond Dart and his young University of Witwatersrand colleague Philip Tobias did a feasibility reconnaissance (Dart 1958), as did Kinji Imanishi and Junichiro Itani from the Japan Monkey Center (Imanishi 1958). Masao Kawai and Hiroki Mizuhara conducted a 45-day field study of gorilla behavior and ecology. Niels Bolwig, also of Witwatersrand, studied gorilla and chimpanzee nests. All of these researchers seemed driven by scientific curiosity, and each seemed to have high professional regard for the others. All of them acknowledged Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s studies, some effusively. Dart wrote, “through the persistence and enterprise of these two women there has been gathered systematically for the first time information gleaned over the course of a year about the movements and associations of the gorillas in South-western (sic) Uganda. This initial cyclical record is naturally of great value to any future worker there….. The zeal of Miss Donisthorpe especially led to the collection of plants used by the gorillas as food and a better understanding of their groupings.” (pp. 192-193). Kawai and Mizuhara (1958) wrote that “the excellent study of J.H. Donisthorpe left an epochal footprint in the history of gorilla study.” (pg. 1). Bolwig (1959) wrote that his work was “a continuation of that begun by Miss Donisthorpe. My observations fully confirm those made by her” (pg. 286).

George Schaller and John Emlen

John Emlen, a professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, also studied mountain gorillas in 1959. The New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) and the U.S. National Science Foundation funded the work. Emlen was accompanied by his wife, Jinny, his graduate student George Schaller, and Schaller’s wife, Kay. Their initial focus was like Derscheid’s: a big-picture survey of the distribution and numbers of all mountain gorillas. But they were also looking for a location at which Schaller could do an intensive behavioral ecology study. Emlen, Schaller, and their wives stayed at Travellers Rest when working on the Uganda side of the Virungas, enjoying Baumgartel’s hospitality and expertise.   

The survey ran from early March to the end of July 1959 (Emlen 1960, Emlen and Schaller 1960). Schaller then began a study of the mountain gorillas on the Congolese side of the Virungas (where the Akeleys and the Binghams had worked), from August 1959 to September 1960. Kay, in Schaller’s words, was a “secretary, field hand, critic, cook, companion,” a role similar to Lucille Bingham’s minus the pistol and the plunge into wild carrots. George logged 466 hours of observations during 314 encounters, some of which lasted for hours. He even slept near the gorillas on eight nights. He was determined to make close, detailed, and extended observations of gorilla behavior. Schaller acknowledged and cited all of the above studies in his classic book, The Mountain Gorilla (1963), which was the published version of his PhD thesis. He cited Donisthorpe’s 1958 paper repeatedly, usually to confirm her conclusions but sometimes to differ (e.g., Schaller established that the gorillas don’t migrate up and down the volcanoes seasonally, as Osborn and Donisthorpe had suspected). He used and improved Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s methodology: open approach; no stealthy pursuits, no hiding, no following, no firearms (see below). 

Schaller was more successful than any previous observer in habituating the gorillas: getting them to tolerate his presence, even regularly expressing curiosity in him. He studied the same topics as previous observers but described more examples (e.g. 2,439 nests) and supplemented his rich descriptions with 67 tables of quantitative data. Schaller provided the first precise criteria for age/sex categories; identified ten groups of known (some were named) individuals and observed them repeatedly; and described the gorillas’ social behavior, including aggression, dominance relationships, grooming, reproductive behavior, displays, facial expressions, and infant development. He provided hard data on home range, daily activity cycles, and travel distances, and sound spectrograms of the most common vocalizations. Like Bingham, he concluded (mistakenly) that wild mountain gorillas never drink. 

Schaller states flatly that Bingham and Donisthorpe “failed in their attempts to observe gorillas directly for prolonged periods.” (1963, pg. 20). This is largely true, despite Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s using their new method for scientific observation of mountain gorillas. As noted, they did not carry guns. Donisthorpe allowed the gorillas to see her openly rather than hiding and sneaking up on them. She feigned disinterest in the gorillas. And she declined to pursue the gorillas if the gorillas voluntarily moved away from her. They never wrote a concise summary of these innovations. One has to search for them (Baumgartel 1976, pg. 74, Donisthorpe 1958, pp. 200, 214; Wordsworth 1961, pp. 78, 83, 88, 162). Schaller probably had a general sense, from conversations with Baumgartel, of how Osborn and Donisthorpe had worked. But he reinvented and augmented their method, and presented it as a coherent whole (Schaller 1963, pp. 20-23). He did not give specific credit to Osborn/Donisthorpe for the new methodology. It’s not that he took credit; rather, the women failed to take credit for their own methodological innovations. Only in retrospect can we appreciate the pioneering and courageous nature of their methodology. 

Schaller added a methodological tweak by always approaching the gorillas alone, quietly and calmly. Osborn and Donisthorpe were usually accompanied by trackers, porters, and tourists, who were often noisy and overreactive. He put in many more observational hours over a longer period. And he chose the Congolese side of the Virungas because the vegetation was more sparse and the terrain more open, greatly facilitating detailed observation. These factors, combined with the less intrusive, more respectful observation technique led to progressively longer, more relaxed, and intimate encounters with calm, trusting gorillas. This allowed improved recognition and naming of individual gorillas, and detailed observations of their family relationships and social interactions. 

We learned a lot about mountain gorillas between 1956 and 1961, with each successive study making our knowledge more complete and more accurate. If the story had ended there, Osborn and Donisthorpe would be minor but recognized semi-professional scientific contributors and pioneer mountain gorilla observers. But things changed in 1960. 

Jane Goodall, Louis Leakey, and National Geographic

Paul Zahl, a senior scientist and writer for the National Geographic Society (NGS), published an illustrated article about mountain gorillas in the January 1960 issue of The National Geographic magazine. The article mentions Baumgartel and Donisthorpe but none of the others. It includes a general but accurate account of gorilla natural history and a good share of sensationalism, cute gorilla infants, and snarling adults. The article revealed (or perhaps awakened) an insatiable public appetite for stories about great apes, and the Society’s trustees saw new and fruitful ground for its grant program. Also in 1960, Jane Goodall and her remarkable mother Vanne arrived at the Gombe Stream Reserve (now Gombe National Park) in what was then Tanganyika (Tanzania today). Goodall’s goal was to study the reserve’s wild chimpanzees. Her mother went along to satisfy the demand of the park warden that an expatriate could not work alone in the reserve.  

Almost all of the information in the next six paragraphs is taken from Dale Peterson’s biography of Goodall (2008) and Virginia Morell’s biography of the Leakey family (1995). Goodall, a pretty, adventurous, and outgoing 23 year-old, arrived in Nairobi in 1957 to fulfill a childhood dream that, like Donisthorpe’s, had been shaped by reading Tarzan books as a child. Like Osborn, she had no formal post-secondary education, except a year of study at a London secretarial school. She had worked as a secretary at Cambridge University, until she finally felt liberated to travel to Africa by the accidental death of her dog. She cold-called Louis Leakey in May to get his advice on working with animals, and by September had become his personal secretary at the Coryndon Museum. It was from Leakey that she learned of the Gombe chimpanzees, and his hope to send a scientist to study their behavior. 

Leakey, a paleoanthropologist, was interested in early humans. He thought he could learn about the behavior of extinct human ancestors by studying the behavior of the living great apes – chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans. Leakey had earlier sponsored a man to study the Gombe chimpanzees but he had not been successful. Osborn had had some success with gorillas, and Leakey now wanted to recruit additional women to study the apes, because, he said, women were more patient, would be less threatening to wild animals, and less likely to provoke aggression from male apes.

Leakey offered the Gombe opportunity to Goodall in September 1957. He told Goodall that his previous secretary “had left to watch gorillas.” Leakey had made good on his pledge to reunite his family, and insisted that Jane’s appointment would have to be approved by Mary because she was jealous and had suspected that Leakey had been flirting with Osborn. He would not be able to call Goodall by her first name, at least in front of Mary. Leakey began what would prove to be a protracted search for funding and permits for the Gombe research. Jane dug into her secretarial work and enjoyed a rollicking social life of a young, attractive English woman in Nairobi. She attracted many male admirers, especially middle-aged and older, married men. She appears to have been skilled in repelling unwanted advances. 

It all worked for a while. Goodall developed a strong personal fondness for Louis Leakey, and regard for his accomplishments and skills. Peterson writes that “Jane was looking for the love of a father.” Leakey however was “looking for the love of a lover,” a new lover, and it was not long before he was declaring his love for Goodall, sending her love notes and flowers, inviting her to accompany him on overnight trips, and entering her room to leave love tokens when she was not there. Goodall was disbelieving at first, thinking that “he was too fond of me for any monkey business.” She found the prospect of physical contact with him revolting, and finally demanded that he desist. Peterson writes that “Louis slowly transformed his passion to a more tempered and paternal kind of love,” but their working relationship deteriorated.  

The Gombe money came through in 1959, from a Chicago industrialist, Leighton Wilkie. Wilkie’s foundation had been supporting the Leakeys’ archeological research for four years, and had provided a camera for Donisthorpe’s study in 1957. Wilkie was the founder of DoAll Sawing Products, a leading manufacturer of machine tools. He was interested in the history of tools and technology, which included an interest in the prehistoric tools that Mary and Louis were excavating in East Africa. There were reports that chimpanzees could use tools, e.g. Savage and Wyman (1843-44) reported that wild chimpanzees opened palm nuts by pounding them with stones. Leakey and probably Wilkie were hoping to find that the Gombe chimpanzees used tools.  

Goodall did indeed find that wild chimpanzees used, and even made tools. Her discoveries went far beyond tool-use (Goodall 1986; van Lawick-Goodall 1968), but her justified luminance is best summarized by “redefining what it is to be human.” (Peterson 208, pg. 210). At the time, “human” was defined as “the tool-using animal.” When Goodall announced that wild chimpanzees used tools, “human” was redefined as “the tool-making animal.” Then Goodall reported that that the Gombe chimpanzees also made their tools. 

National Geographic Magazine published Goodall’s groundbreaking work rapidly in two richly illustrated articles (Goodall, 1963, van Lawick-Goodall, 1965). NGS also produced a full-length documentary for television in 1965 and became a sponsor of the project. Goodall left Gombe intermittently between 1962 and 1965 to earn her doctorate in zoology at Cambridge University under Professor Robert Hinde. Leakey was building a powerful dynasty: his and Mary’s archeological work in Kenya, support and broad public exposure from the National Geographic Society, and scientific collaboration with Hinde at Louis’ alma mater at Cambridge. Further, the study of wild great apes was moving from an obscure scientific pursuit of elitist academics to a heroic and glamorous public enterprise by a determined and relatable young woman, a new narrative, which aligned well with the emerging feminism of the 60s and 70s. 

Goodall was pursuing her PhD and Osborn her B.A. and master’s degrees at Cambridge at the same time (1962-1965), both under Hinde’s supervision. Their paths certainly crossed when they gave back-to-back presentations from the same lectern at a symposium in London in 1962. Peterson said they knew each other, and that Goodall had learned of Osborn’s affair with Leakey. Given that both women revered Leakey and were supervised by Hinde, it’s not unreasonable to assume some mutual jealousy and competitiveness

Dian Fossey and Louis Leakey  

With Goodall’s success, Leakey wanted another young woman to study mountain gorillas. In a 1966 letter to Leighton Wilkie seeking funding for a mountain gorilla project (reproduced in Hayes 1990, pp 121-122), Leakey describes Schaller’s study as “magnificent as far as it went but it was very incomplete.” He did not mention the other six other studies on the gorillas of the Virungas from the late 1950s. He argued for a longer-term study, one that “would follow Jane’s example,” and fit the new narrative. Louis offered Dian Fossey the mountain gorilla opportunity in 1966. He secured funding from the Wilkie Foundation and the National Geographic Society, and Fossey began her work on the Congolese side of the Virungas in early 1967, after having visited Jane Goodall briefly at Gombe. Fossey was 34 at the time. Armed conflict forced her to abandon the Congo site. She returned to Nairobi to consult with Leakey. They became lovers (Morell 1995), “with Leakey more the pursuer than the pursued” (Newman 2013, pg 97). Leakey was concerned for her safety, and tried to redirect her interest to lowland gorillas or orangutans. Fossey was determined to study mountain gorillas, and relocated her field site to the Rwanda portion of the Virungas in late 1967. She often visited Travellers Rest. By 1970, she had logged 2,255 hours of contact with wild mountain gorillas. She got her PhD in 1976 from Cambridge University, under the mentorship of Robert Hinde. National Geographic featured her work early and prominently (Fossey 1970, 1971), and she was scientifically productive (Beck 1986, Fossey 1972, 1974, 1979, 1982, Fossey and Harcourt 1977).  

Fossey and Goodall mastered techniques for habituating wild apes. They, like Osborn and Donisthorpe, moved openly, slowly, and unobtrusively while trying to contact the apes, and wore clothes that became familiar to the gorillas. Fossey and Goodall additionally sat quietly when contact was made, without staring at the apes. They often emulated ape feeding (sometimes even eating leaves), scratching themselves, belching, and imitating ape vocalizations. The apes not only stopped running away, they started approaching the scientists, even pestering them. (Goodall also lured the chimpanzees with bananas; Fossey did not give food to the gorillas). Goodall and Fossey were often in physical contact with the apes – tickling, grooming, hugging, and carrying them. The intimacy and detail of their observations was and still is breathtaking, and revealed “reciprocal agreements” (Herzfeld 2017) of curiosity, respect, and trust between apes and humans. This extraordinary adaptation of the Osborn/Donisthorpe/Schaller approach, and the extremely long durations of their studies, allowed Goodall and Fossey to ultimately find their apes easily and watch them for prolonged sessions. They came to recognize dozens of individual apes, and gave them easy-to-remember names. They were able to construct family trees, from which we got what is arguably the most distinctive scientific finding of these studies: the social fabric of chimpanzees and mountain gorillas is based on kinship. It’s all about family. And the ape families were seductively similar to our own, with characters with names like Uncle Bert. Apes were no longer “other,” they were “us;” many were true friends of the observers. With the new narrative, Leakey’s protégées and the apes became celebrities.

Leakey recruited a third primatologist, Birute Galdikas, to study the orangutans of Borneo. She and her husband began their study in 1971. They collected important behavioral ecological data but were redirected to save and rehabilitate the many orphaned orangutan infants that were brought to their camp. The cute babies, and their clever imitation of humans (e.g. making cooking fires, washing laundry) made great fodder for National Geographic features (Galdikas 1975, 1980). 

Galdikas, Goodall, and Fossey came to be known as Leakey’s Trimates, and they became grubby but glamorous stars in countless documentary and dramatic films and books. Their own personal lives, variously as wives, mothers, divorcees, lovers, and subjects of intrigue, scandal, and media expose’ were as alluring as the apes’. The Trimates have made generational-defining contributions to science and conservation. Fossey’s confrontational “active conservation” techniques have been condemned (e.g. Rodriguez 2019, Shoumatoff 1986, Weber and Vedder 2001), but without Fossey there would be no mountain gorillas today. The Trimates have motivated thousands of young people, notably young women, to pursue interests, indeed careers, in wildlife and the environmental sciences. They in turn were instructed, nurtured, protected, inspired, trusted, and supported by Louis Leakey. Even with his professionally inappropriate tastes for young, vulnerable women, he and the Trimates revolutionized primatology. 

History Revised 

But the new narrative squeezed Rosalie Osborn and Jill Donisthorpe into obscurity and has all but erased any record of their courageous and pioneering efforts. Their exile started in 1964 with Schaller, in his book The Year of the Gorilla, which was written for a popular audience. Of Osborn and Donisthorpe, he wrote, “the amount of concrete information about the behavior of the apes which these investigators obtained was minute” (pp. 9-10, italics added). 

Fossey, in Gorillas in the Mist, turns Schaller’s devaluation into denial. She wrote that mountain gorillas, “had, by 1960, been studied in the wild only by George Schaller” (pg. xviii, italics added). She wrote that Schaller, “was the first person to conduct a reliable field study of the mountain gorillas” (pg. 2, italics added) and that Leakey “suggested that I become the ‘gorilla girl’ he had been seeking…” (pg. 4, italics added). (Leakey may have said this, but Fossey had read Baumgartel’s book and knew that Baumgartel had used “gorilla girl” to describe Donisthorpe). Fossey added: “As a pioneer I sometimes did endure loneliness, but I have reaped a tremendous satisfaction that followers will never be able to know” (pg. 25, italics added). Fossey may have been a sloppy historian, or she intentionally denied and purposefully assumed Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s pioneering roles in the scientific study of mountain gorillas. Hayes (1990) noted that Fossey would often make “near-heroic efforts to reconstruct those parts of her life that were not consistent with her larger vision of herself” (pg. 81). She discounted the work of the Akeleys, Derscheid, the Binghams, Kawai, Mizuhara, and Bolwig as well. The earlier history just did not fit the new narrative. And the historical rewrite worked: In her 1983 New York Times review of Gorillas in the Mist, Katherine Bouton wrote “Only one other, George B. Schaller, had ever studied them [mountain gorillas] in the wild” (Section 7, pg. 2).   

In 2004, Virginia Morell interviewed Jane Goodall for the Leakey Foundation Oral History Project. There was an exchange about Osborn and Donisthorpe that is revealing though uncharacteristically ungracious for both. Discussing Leakey’s response to Goodall’s early findings at Gombe, Morell said:

“He must have been just elated. He tried a couple of other young—well, one other young woman in particular” (pg. 20).

Goodall: “Rosalie Osborn”. 

Morell: “Rosalie Osborn”. 

Goodall: “And there was another, wasn’t there. Jill—“.

 Morell: “Jill Donisthorpe”.

Goodall: “Jill Donisthorpe”.

Morell: “Yes, but you were the first true success, someone who he could actually say she’s done something”.

Goodall: “Yeah, yeah. That’s right” (pg. 21, italics added).

Morell made a leading statement, and Goodall’s response may have been thoughtless. But oral histories can’t be edited.

In 50 years, Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s courageous and determined research had gone from being “fine observations” (Emlen) “of great value to any future worker…” (Dart), to an “…excellent study that left an epochal footprint in the history of gorilla study” (Kawai and Mizuhara), to “… fully confirmable observations…” (Bolwig), to a “… minute amount of concrete information …” (Schaller), to nonexistent (Fossey), to “Yeah, yeah…” (Goodall). Even Donna Haraway, a leader in feminist thought and author of Primate Visions (1989), an exhaustive exploration of sexism in primatology, overlooked Osborn and Donisthorpe.

Osborn and Donisthorpe were undeniably the first women to conduct authentic research with wild mountain gorillas, perhaps with any wild ape. They were the pioneers. They revolutionized the methods for studying the gorillas and wrote the first scientific papers. Mary Akeley and Lucille Bingham were pioneers too, but neither presumed to conduct systematic scientific research and neither published their work in scientific journals or books. Gorilla girls or not, their work is as disregarded by today’s scholars as the more scientific efforts of  Osborn and Donisthorpe.

The oversights, appropriations, and dismissals may not have been conscious or intentional. Prejudice, romance, jealousy, and professional reputation were at play. This is not an attempt to diminish or discredit Leakey, Schaller, Goodall, or Fossey. But our scientific generation is largely unappreciative of the inventiveness and importance of Osborn’s and Donisthorpe’s work. Of course neither woman chose to continue to do primate research, and both seemed to be content with scientific obscurity. We probably will never know if this was lack of aspiration or professional discouragement. 

And Rosalie Osborn gets the last word. Her love for Louis Leakey endured. Upon his death in 1972, Mary, embittered by his continued infidelities, refused to put a headstone on his grave (Morell 1995). Osborn did. Although the inscription is misquoted on websites and in Morell’s book, it is a public and enduring love letter, signed by Osborn “ILYUA,” a coded declaration of love (“I will love you always”) with which she had signed her earlier love letters to Leakey. She directed in her will that some of her ashes be sprinkled at the location of Leakey’s grave (Ngonyo, personal communication). 

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Acknowledgements: Stephanie Fowler, reviewed the first draft and made extensive suggestions, and four colleagues, all conversant with the study of mountain gorillas, provided expert reviews.

Disclosure: My wife was a junior colleague when we met in 1977, and we were each married to other people at the time.