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November Read - Orangutans



Tags: books

Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo (Biruté Galdikas, 1995)

When I was reading articles about Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, I had to admit that I didn't know anything about Biruté Galdikas, the third Leakey protege who studied orangutans. Unlike the others, she was a graduate researcher before her project. She arrived in Kalimantan (Indonesian side of Borneo) in 1971. This book narrates a lot of encounters between orangutans before embracing a few human moments as well.

Content warning: this book is open/TMI about anything which can occur around orangutans. It is not for kids.

We are introduced to a Lithuanian family that embraced academics and nature in their new home in Canada. Young Biruté found a specific interest in orangutans in high school. She tells her story with some mystical qualities to how she happened to hear about Goodall, meet Leakey, and other "flashes of clairvoyance". When she describes writing prospective letters to Borneo from college, I can recognize a bit of myself.

After their first meeting, Louis Leakey administered a few tests or mind games (including asking to remove her appendix; Galdikas "didn't take him seriously", Fossey complied). Later she describes a bedside meeting where Leakey advised her and her husband about birth control in the field, and FGM practices in Kikuyu culture. The takeaway is supposed to be "just how African Louis was".
During two years of preparation and networking, Galdikas has an opportunity to visit Gombe, and stay in a London apartment with Leakey, Goodall's family, and Fossey, where she is awed by both kindness and ordinariness. She leaves us with some theories about Louis Leakey (feeling that she had fulfilled a daughterly role).

After arriving in Indonesia, Galdikas and her first husband struggle at first. She explains how their forest is not a "cathedral" nor a bounty of foods, but a swamp. They eat lots of rice and sardines, and share a few changes of perpetually wet clothes.
The nearest villages are accessible only by boat. Despite isolation, a few pieces of mail get through, and they hear about Leakey's death over the radio news. The book does a good job distinguishing Malay and Dayak culture, and cultural effects on conservation (Muslims avoid bushmeat, new residents are less careful with burning practices).

The work includes rehabilitating former captive orangutans. When the team hears about a captive young orangutan, they will go with forestry officials to acquire it or prevent it from being sold. Galdikas becomes attached to a young female orangutan, named Akmad. At times Akmad was welcome in Camp Leakey, sharing meals and becoming a fixture as "nest-mother".
We hear about ways that Galdikas and her husband worked with people in government, and confronted loggers. In 1975 local perception was shifting, and officials in the government and military started to give up their pet orangutans and expand protected areas. Galdikas would spend time at the National Geographic DC office and appear on a cover in 1975. A photo of her son and an orangutan appear on a cover in 1980. Having faced some criticism, Galdikas talks about this both from a maternal perspective (how carefully she watches her son) and scientific (watching his interests, playfulness, and 'learning sign language' diverge from baby orangutans).

After finalizing her PhD and divorce, Galdikas repositions herself to split time between Camp Leakey, a nearby town, and a university in Vancouver. After being isolated at Camp Leakey for so long, Galdikas starts to pick up Indonesian culture from research students and an ambassador's wife, and marries a Dayak guide. She describes her family as "an Indonesian household".
After founding Orangutan Foundation International in 1986, she appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In 1994, as the book was being written, The Guardian published an article critical of Galdikas, "Monkey Business in Borneo":

today Camp Leakey is a shambles. Galdikas has gone. After many years battling with the Indonesian authorities, she lost control of her orang-utan rehabitation programme last year, and may not even be allowed back to continue her research into the animals living wild around the camp.
[...] "It is the same pattern as Dian Fossey. She began as a scientist, but she has become more and more attached to the animals and more involved in conflicts with local people and the authorities."

After reading Eden, Linda Spalding was inspired to write her own book. She also was shocked to find Camp Leakey empty. Her attempts to confront Galdikas there and on her book tour led to an unflattering travelogue The Follow with excerpts appearing in Newsweek and Outside magazines. The lasting impact is that Galdikas's work may get associated with carelessness about contact between humans, captive orangutans, and the wild (sections definitely bring this to mind - wild orangutans' reacting to her carrying a young orangutan into the field, allowing captive orangutans to suck her thumbs, the camp being ransacked when they are away). Around the time of her PhD, she begins to clarify that she never has orangutans in her house (meaning, after leaving Camp Leakey).
Today every post on Galdikas's Instagram account ends with:

Note: Dr. Biruté and OFI do not endorse handling or close proximity to wildlife.

Some research on orangutan communities after rehabilitation, using data from Camp Leakey: https://www.science.org/content/article/are-mistaken-reintroductions-harming-endangered-wildlife

GoodReads reviews of The Follow hint at deeper issues, calling Galdikas "NUT JOB" and "the equivalent of a crazy cat-lady".
What I saw in the Outside excerpt, was that Galdikas found the time to write this book in the middle of another shift, where she had stopped living at Camp Leakey. There had been a falling-out with some staff and Earthwatch volunteers. She began taking on other roles including writing, finding homes for confiscated orangutans, filming documentaries, and developing a stake in Rimba Orangutan Ecolodge.

In 1998, Julia Roberts visited Borneo and interviewed Galdikas for a documentary series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAfL8YrhOT0

The name "Biruté" is now fixed on Wikipedia.
Meanwhile, someone tried renaming the orangutan article to "orangutang" claiming it was the preferred Commonwealth spelling.

The nearby town Pangkalan Bun now has several orangutan eco-tours, palace museums, and a Mie Gacoan restaurant.

From Jane Goodall's blurb on the back cover: "we learn how the value system of the aboriginal people […] can slowly permeate the Western mind". 😬

Orangutan Foundation International accepts cryptocurrency donations (posting about it as recently as June 2025).

A short section praises another Leakey protege, Elizabeth Meyerhoff, who is studying a tribe. In 2014 NPR quoted her as an "anthropologist who has lived in Kenya since the 1970s".

Was Toni Jackman selected by Leakey to study bonobos, also shortly before his death? The claim was added to Wikipedia's "Trimates" article in 2007, so there's just this one unsourced sentence everywhere online.
I did a little research.
Jackman was interviewed for the 1995 book Ancestral Passions. She also traveled to Kenya with Leakey ("I never had any problems with him […] if he were younger and in better health he could have been a handful"), and she believed that his son Richard redirected funding after Louis's death. She expected to work with "the pygmy chimpanzee" (an old name for bonobos). According to Reflections of Eden, Galdikas had also been considered for bonobo research if the Borneo project fell through.
Jackman later joined the US Foreign Service, and teaches/taught geology at Wichita State. The campus newspaper interviewed her in 2014. She describes years in Kenya studying "smaller primates" and there's no mention of bonobos.

Previous Reads / Notes

I took a photo of a sidewalk delivery bot in my neighborhood in mid-October, and now I see them every time that I'm outside.

High hopes for the new TV series Pluribus. Since this just came out and hasn't entered the public zeitgeist much yet, I made a spoilers GitHub Gist

US ended sanctions on Republika Srpska's Dodik.

A prosecutor in Milan is investigating a longtime rumor that foreigners paid to shoot civilians during the Siege of Sarajevo. After a 2022 documentary, Sarajevo's then-mayor Benjamina Karić filed charges against "persons unknown". The Italian prosecutor remembered rumors during the 90s and was inspired by the documentary. Al Jazeera did a report on it this summer and was more skeptical. The social media repackaging of the story as a proven fact, or that new evidence has emerged, is misleading.

The rise and fall of the phrase "atomic Pearl Harbor": https://bsky.app/profile/wellerstein.bsky.social/post/3m4sj5dsejs2z

A petroglyph in Los Lunas, NM is part of the 'mound builders' alternate history. While doing oryx research, I couldn't get a specific year when Frank Hibben saw this stone in the 1930s or published comments on it. I looked through two of his books about early man in the Americas where he doesn't mention it at all?

AcademicQuran discusses a commonly circulated "flaw" treating Pharaoh as a personal name rather than a title. The Old Testament did the same thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/comments/1ofpdyi/pharaoh_in_the_quran/

Spirits specific to Malaysian Chinese shrines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na_Tuk_Kong

Kazakhs ages 1 to 100: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ojvt0c/people_aged_1_to_100_in_kazakhstan/

The author of Finding W. D. Fard has a new book about Fard. An interview showed up on one of my YouTube channels, but when he started talking about the Illuminati, it raised too many red flags.

Jonathan Mann (who has been posting a song a day for over 6000 days) did a video about his crypto tax nightmare from a few years ago. tl;dr He made $3 million on NFTs of his songs, which meant he would owe $1 million in taxes. He used a loan with his ETH as collateral rather than selling at loss. When Terra / Luna failed, he lost everything but still owed the IRS. This was the first time I understood why someone would consider a cryptocurrency-based loan.

A 1934 guidebook of Shanghai has a surprising level of interest in the Taiping Rebellion from 74 years earlier. The history section concludes with the recent Japanese invasion of Manchuria and "wars come and go…" so they might have felt compelled to include previous battles:

Attention Economy

After the 'character' post, interesting to see this on Defunctland's upcoming video on Walt Disney and animatronics:



Physics YouTuber Angela Collier recently talked about 'conspiracy physics' and the disappointment and confusion about her audience's top channel being contrarian physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.
Angela sees the comments and suggestions from people who clearly aren't watching her full video or absorbing her message. But I think this could still be a tiny fraction of her viewers.

YouTubers Kara and Nate tried to stop at all NYC subway stations in world record time. When they showed the map it was clear to my NYC brain that their guide Jay's plan wasn't working, and Nate talks about figuring it out 19 hours in. There are a few things in the mix: the itinerary wasn't airtight, Jay is changing plans on the fly which likely cascades issues, Kara didn't enjoy being on the train in the first place (she has been public about difficulties with epilepsy), etc.
Viewers are divided about their dynamic especially at the end. I'd say that 20 hours into failing the challenge, everyone's energy and good humor will be depleted. Likely they'd have the same energy in traffic on an endless road trip. You can decide after if that's worth a second chance, or if you were filing someone down to their true self.
Some commenters think Jay was unprepared or did this for a laugh, and I disagree. I lived in NYC and have watched videos of people doing this in Chicago and SF. To me it looked like he cared about the record and getting some notability / notoriety, and he's discovering that he's failed on camera. If they didn't coordinate on Zoom ahead of time or were saying 'sure, whatever', I don't know how serious they were about the record? Their video also got only a few votes on the transit subreddit, I think because it's not oriented for that audience.
AdamDoesNotExist does a lot of transit videos, and his SF video description is "This is what it takes to break a world record public transit speed run". As in: I don't get the record, but you can see and understand.
For YouTube, they could approach the NYC stations run as content-creation. I did wonder about staging since they're asking people for help, running for a connecting train, etc. I think it'd be possible to do a 24-hour challenge like Cafe Anne did, subway bingo, or trying out something at every station on a line, maybe the 7, Q, or F.

I recently gained a follower on HuggingFace whose own profile had models, datasets, and 100+ followers. I didn't know how we connected at first (I had upvoted a regression tutorial, which HuggingFace needs). On further review, the account started two months ago and exclusively focuses on stock prediction with LLMs. Their main project uses semantic search to connect an input headline to old financial news, which then tells you stock movements associated with that. This could be a long con to run something on computers or promote a stock, but it's awfully time-consuming unless the models and datasets were copied from someone? My current guess is it's bad science + good influencing, but a real person.
Later HuggingFace cleared out some bots, and this user complained about losing many followers.