NC

A FEEDING STRATEGY
Jane sits on the concrete foundation of
the new feeding station she and Hugo
built, up the hill from their lakefront
near camp, to draw chimps to observe
bananas became aggressive, they
moved the site farther away.
Jane wrote to others that she was “horrified”
by the overture from Leakey, who was 30 years
her senior and married. For months after Jane
told him firmly that she’d never return his feelings,
Leakey still sent her love letters.
In an interview years later with Virginia Morell,
author of a book on the Leakey family, Jane
said that “what I was most afraid of was what my
rejection of him might mean for my study of the
chimpanzees.” But Leakey never withdrew his
support—and by the summer of 1960 Jane was
setting up camp in the Gombe Stream Reserve
near the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with enough
funding for six months of fieldwork. Because government
officials wouldn’t allow a lone female to
live in the reserve, Vanne Morris-Goodall came
along as her daughter’s chaperone.
From the start Jane followed her instincts
for conducting research. Not knowing that the
established scientific practice was to use
numbers to identify animals under study, she
recorded observations of the chimps by names
she concocted: Fifi, Flo, Mr. McGregor, David
Greybeard. She wrote about the chimps as
individuals with distinct traits and personalities—for
example, when a female she called
Mrs. Maggs was preparing a treetop nest for the
night, Jane wrote that the chimp had “tested
the branches exactly the way a person tests the
springs of a hotel bed.”
She spent most waking hours locating the
animals through her binoculars, then trying to
draw gradually closer so they’d get used to her
presence as she sat jotting notes. But with one
month left in the study grant, she hadn’t made
the kind of significant discovery she felt would
justify Leakey’s faith in her.
As her study was approaching its end, Jane
made three discoveries that would not only make
Leakey proud but would also turn established
science on its head.
In her first discovery, she observed a chimp
gnawing on the carcass of a small animal, which
belied the prevailing belief that apes didn’t eat
meat. The chimp was memorable for his prominent
gray goatee, and she would name him David
Greybeard. He in turn would open the door for her
42 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017