Orangutan rescuer Biruté Galdikas, last of “Leakey’s Angels,” dies at 79

Born a “displaced person,”  Biruté Galdikas spent her life aiding & advocating for displaced orangutans

LOS ANGELES––Orangutan researcher,  rescuer,  and conservationist Biruté Galdikas,  79,  died on March 24,  2026 in Los Angeles,  after a prolonged illness.

“Born in Germany,  on May 10, 1946,  while her parents were en route from Lithuania to Canada,”  as displaced persons after World War II,  according to a Sea Shepherd Conservation Society biography posted in 2009 when she joined the Sea Shepherd advisory board,  Galdikas was often misidentified as Lithuania-born.

She grew up in Toronto,  Ontario.

Remembered by Paul Watson

“Birutė and I were both young children in Toronto at the same time,”  recalled Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson,  who headed the organization from 1978 to 2022,  leaving to form the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.

            (See Rebuilding Neptune’s Navy: Captain Paul Watson post-Sea Shepherd.)

“Later,  she became a professor at Simon Fraser University,”  in Vancouver,  British Columbia,  Canada,  “where I was a student,”  Watson said.  “Over the decades, our paths crossed countless times,”  Watson added,  calling Galdikas,  four years older,  “a lifelong friend and hero.”

Wondered where humans came from

According to Galdikas’  Orangutan Foundation International biography,  “From the age of five, Biruté Galdikas has wondered where human beings came from.  She knew they had evolved from ancient apes but she wanted to know more.

“When she was 12,  she loved to go into the wilder sections of High Park in Toronto.  There she would pretend she was a Huron or Iroquois Native slipping through the woods,  at one with nature.  She spent hours like this,  quietly and secretly observing the wild animals in the park.

At age 20,  in 1966,  Galdikas completed bachelor’s degrees in psychology and zoology from the University of British Columbia and the University of California in Los Angeles,  then earned a master’s degree in anthropology from UCLA in 1969 and a doctorate in anthropology, also from UCLA,  in 1978.

Became third “Leakey’s angel”

There,  as a graduate student,  Galdikas met famed  paleontologist Louis Leakey,  who was a visiting lecturer,  renowned for his discoveries of fossils of proto-humans in the Olduvai Gorge of Kenya.  Leakey had earlier recruited Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey to do ethological studies of  chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild in Tanzania and Rwanda,  respectively.

Galdikas asked Leakey to help her similarly research orangutans in Indonesia.

Compared to Goodall and Fossey,  who brought relatively little formal education to their work,  Galdikas was hugely over-qualified.

Camp Leakey

Leakey was reportedly skeptical at first that Galdikas,  with her advanced credentials,  would remain in the field,  but he convinced the National Geographic Society to help Galdikas and her first husband,  Rod Brindamour,  to set up a research camp in Borneo to study orangutans.”

Galdikas’ Camp Leakey,  as she called it,  in the Tanjung Puting Reserve in Indonesian Borneo, was modeled after the Gombe Stream Research Center founded by Jane Goodall in 1965 to study chimpanzees in Tanzania and the Karasoke Research Center founded by Dian Fossey in Rwanda in 1967 to study gorillas.

“A crocodile killed a swimming tourist”

“Biruté arrived in Borneo with her husband,  Rod Brindamour,  in 1971,”  summarizes the Orangutan Foundation International biography.  “They had to live in primitive conditions.”

The original Galdikas/Brindamour home “was just a platform with a roof over it.  There was no kitchen,  bathroom, or protection from mosquitoes or other wild animals,  especially the fire ants,”  testified veterinarian Carl Palazzol,  who visited in 1991.

By then,  Palazzol said,  visiting scientists “shared an outhouse with a squat toilet,  and if you wanted to bathe, you jumped in the Sekonyer river, as long as the Dayaks said ‘the coast is clear’ in regard to venomous snakes,  like the common krait,  that frequents the area.

“When I returned to Borneo 21 years later,”  Palazzol added,  “no one was allowed to go in the river because a crocodile killed a swimming tourist.”

Remarried to local rice farmer

Resumed the Orangutan Foundation International biography,  “Within a few years,   Biruté gave birth to a son, Binty,  who was raised among the orangutans and dubbed ‘the child of the rain forest.’  Biruté had to make difficult choices in the years that followed.  She made the agonizing decision to remain in the rain forest when her marriage ended.  Her son Binti returned to Canada with her ex-husband.

“Later she remarried and had two more children,”  with Pak Bohap,  “a Dayak rice farmer,   tribal president,  and co-director of the orangutan program there.”

Another early visitor to Camp Leakey––eight years before Palozzol––was Lisa Jones-Engel,  who volunteered for Galdikas for seven months while still in high school.

Sent 17-year-old into swamps to study macaques

“Galdikas studied orangutans, but she asked Jones-Engel to spend time with the wild macaques living in swamps around the camp.  Sometimes Jones-Engel paddled a dugout canoe,  but mostly she slogged through muck up to her armpits,”  recounted Harriet Brown for The Guardian in 2022.

“She never once came out dry,” Galdikas said of Jones-Engel.  “She was courageous.”

Jones-Engel,  now chief science advisor to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,  went on to become a Ph.D.-holding primatologist,  working at the New York University Laboratory for Experimental Medicine & Surgery in Primates [LEMSIP],  closed in 1995.

(See James Mahoney, DVM, “the Oskar Schindler of laboratory primates,” dies at 77.)

Later employed at the University of Washington primate research center,  Jones-Engel changed careers in 2019 after 30 years in academic work.

“Wouldn’t be here without Birutė Galdikas”

“I wouldn’t be where I am today without Birutė Galdikas,”  Jones-Engle told ANIMALS 24-7.
“In Borneo in 1983,  as her field assistant,  she sent me into the swamps each day to follow the long-tailed macaques,  then sat with me in her hut each week to go over my field notes, instilling a rigor and clarity that shaped my path,  and making clear that our responsibility is not just to the science,  but to the animals themselves.

“At the same time, her quiet mentoring—and the occasional treat of a Coke—was its own kind of care for a 17-year-old she took a chance on, and it left a mark that never faded.

“The bit about a Coke may sound odd,”  Jones-Engel said,  “but in the middle of the Bornean rain forest,  where treats were generally non-existent,  it meant something very profound.”

Gary Shapiro

Conditions at Camp Leakey began to improve after Gary Shapiro,  a former Galdikas student,  helped her to form the Los Angeles-based Orangutan Foundation International in 1986,  taking over financial responsibility for the research center from the National Geographic Foundation.

Galdikas’ 1995 book Reflections of Eden helped to draw attention to her work,  much as Gorillas In The Mist did for Dian Fossey in 1983 and The Chimpanzees of Gombe did for Jane Goodall in 1986.

Support from Suharto

Galdikas somewhat surprisingly enjoyed substantial political support from the Suharto government during her first three decades in Indonesia.  Suharto (1921-2008),  who used only one name,  ruled Indonesia as head of a notoriously ruthless,  murderous,  and corrupt military dictatorship from 1967 until his resignation under pressure in 1998.

“From March 1996 through the end of March 1998 under a special decree,  Biruté served as a senior advisor to the Minister of Forestry on orangutan issues,”  says the Orangutan Foundation International bio.

“In June 1997 she won the prestigious Kalpataru award, the highest award given by the Republic of Indonesia for outstanding environmental leadership and activity.  Biruté Galdikas was the first person of non-Indonesian birth and one of the first women to be so recognized by the Indonesian government.”

“We are looking at what happened to American bison”

“It’s very scary,'”  Galdikas told New York Times correspondent Seth Mydans in December 1997.

“We are looking at the demise of the orangutan as a species in the wild, which basically is what happened to American bison.  It’s a terrible situation,  and unfortunately it’s not going to change. Illegal logging and the clearing of trees for plantations,”  chiefly to grow palm oil,  “are absolutely demolishing the forests.”

Pet orangutans

Wrote Mydans,  “It is against the law to own an orangutan in Indonesia,  but the laws are widely flouted.  Pet orangutans,”  captured as babies after their parents were shot by poachers and loggers,  “are sometimes dressed in human clothes,  given pillows for their beds and fed together with the family.  Sometimes they are taught to perform simple tasks as servants,  like opening doors and fetching food.

“When they are fully grown — some reaching five and a half feet and 150 pounds — orangutans can be unruly.  Their owners often dispose of them, sometimes selling them to traders for zoos.

“With the backing of national and local officials,”  Mydans continued,  “Galdikas began recovering these pets and training them to live in the wild.

“Over the years,”  Mydans said,  “she has helped more than 100 orangutans return to the forests.  But many of these remain immigrants in their own habitat and spend much of their time close to Camp Leakey,  their second home,  where they receive daily feedings and beg for treats from visitors,  together with several cats.”

“Suharto was at heart a conservationist”

During this time Galdikas also became known as one of several researchers who documented a marked decline of most well-known Indonesian wildlife,  including as well as orangutans,  tigers, the Asian rhinoceros,  and flying fox bats.

Wrote Galdikas in a 1999 installment of the Orangutan Foundation International newsletter,  “In May 1998 the government of former President Suharto was toppled after massive student demonstrations and rioting which rocked Jakarta and the country.  But while some things got better, some things got a lot worse.

“Suharto was at heart a conservationist and honestly wanted to leave behind forests and some wilderness for his grandchildren,”  Galdikas argued.  “After his government was toppled, there was a power vacuum at the center, and many people realised very quickly that they could now do whatever they liked.

“Invaded by illegal loggers”

“Tanjung Puting is a case in point.  The good news is that the fifty square kilometer forest area with Camp Leakey at its center where I have worked with orangutans for the past twenty-eight years has not been touched. But every other part of the national park has been invaded by illegal loggers.

“Throughout Indonesia,  all national parks with stands of timber are being logged and the situation is so bad that illegal logging now outstrips legal timber production. In our province, Kalimantan Tengah, it is estimated that 80% of the timber production is illegal,”  yet “entirely commercial, highly organized,”  and destroying orangutan habitat.

Galdikas lobbied for military protection.  Meanwhile,  in 1999,  she continued,  “an American proboscis monkey researcher working for Conservation International was chased from her camp in the park by 100 local men waving machetes who claimed that they were ’emancipating’ her camp for the local community.

“As soon as she and her assistants left,  the illegal logging which had already been quite blatant in her study area absolutely exploded.”

Tourists were diverted to Camp Leakey.

Protected by marines

“Local illegal loggers stressed they supported Camp Leakey and would protect it from logging as Camp Leakey had more legitimacy,  in their eyes, than any other area in the park,”  Galdikas continued.

“Part of that legitimacy was derived,  they claimed,  not just from our long-term presence but also from the fact we worked for the ‘social good’ of the local communities.”

Eventually,  “on the direction of the [new] president and his cabinet,  a warship and two other Navy ships appeared and seized three barges loaded with illegal ramin timber from the park,”  Galdikas said.  “At the same time, 100 marines began patrolling the park using the warship as a base.  The logging stopped almost immediately.”

Orangutan Foundation International in September 1999 “agreed to help the local government by underwriting the cost of distributing government-supplied rice to the people of the three Melayu villages in the immediate vicinity of the park,”  Galdikas detailed.

Erik Meijaard

This helped,  “But after I left Pangkalan Bun to come back to North America during September,”  Galdikas recounted,  “the logging started up again”

Orangutan Foundation International proposed “funding one hundred local volunteers,  Dayak and Melayu,  to patrol the park,”  Galdikas mentioned,  but that came to little.

Galdikas’ approach already had a legion of mainstream conservationist critics.

In a 1999 biography entitled A Dark Place in the Jungle: Following Leakey’s Last Angel into
Borneo,  Canadian author Linda Spalding questioned whether Galdikas’ emphasis on
individual animal rescue was an effective approach on behalf of orangutans as a species,  as opposed to preserving orangutan habitat,  a concern Galdikas scarcely ignored.

Borneo-based Nature Conservancy scientist Erik Meijaard alleged that Galdikas was
“playing around with symbolism without getting to the core of the issue.”

Meijaard now chairs the Wild Pig Specialist Group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

“Acts of local revenge”

Galdikas escalated her work on behalf of habitat.

“For decades,”  Galdikas explained in a 2001 sequel,  “the Dayak and Melayu people of Kalimantan Tengah were kept on the outside looking in as cronies of President Suharto and his family exploited the region’s timber and mineral wealth.

“During those years, the government in Jakarta enforced protection of Camp Leakey and the orangutan study area around it,  as it did many such areas in National Parks throughout Indonesia.  Former President Suharto and some of his strong-arm generals considered themselves conservationists and so stayed informed about forest and conservation issues.

“Villagers,  local timber barons and economic predators from other parts of Indonesia all kept their distance. Now, there is a gold and timber rush by the people of Kalimantan and others smelling new opportunities.  Acts of local revenge include violent confrontations between machete-wielding village men and officials who try to control their outlaw activities. Some of this I actually witnessed,”  Galdikas testified.

“Looted and destroyed as we watched”

“Tanjung Puting National Park offices in Kumai were looted and destroyed.  My video camera was slapped from my hands and smashed to smithereens.”

Even the Orangutan Foundation International study area “began to be looted and destroyed as we watched,”  Galdikas said.

Her response was to launch “a five-year $10 million economic and eco-development initiative,”  providing “employment––daily,  dependable,  paid labor for village people––to improve roads,  schools,  and medical and sanitation facilities for their communities,  and lodging and water transportation for eco-tourists.”

Rainforest Reptile Refuge

Meanwhile,  during her returns to Canada to teach at Simon Fraser University,  Galdikas became involved in other wildlife issues,  not all of them involving orangutans.

In 1998,  in Vancouver with her children Jane and Fred,  Galdikas saw a softshell turtle dying a slow death at a live market,  “waiting to be made into turtle soup,   the Rainforest Reptile Refuge newsletter recounted.

Galdikas rescued the turtle,  then became an enthusiastic supporter of the Rainforest Reptile Refuge,  which survived for 17 years just north of the U.S. border in Surrey,  British Columbia,  closing in 2007.

Rusti

A few years later Galdikas became involved in the long-running saga of Rusti,  a sterilized hybrid of the Bornean and Sumatran orangutan subspecies.

Born in Seattle,  but rejected by his mother,  Rusti was raised by human foster parents before ending up at the Scotch Plains Zoo in New Jersey,  closed in 1997.

Rusti went from there to the Honolulu Zoo,  where his plight became a cause celebré after the zoo announced that his habitat was to be replaced by a lorikeet exhibit,  and that Rusti could not be kept.  As a hybrid,  Rusti allegedly had no conservation value.

Plans fell through

Orangutan Foundation International in February 2003 announced that it would build a state-of-the-art orangutan sanctuary at Kualoa Ranch in Oahu, Hawaii,  and later got as far as a groundbreaking ceremony at a potential sanctuary site on Hilo.

After repeated delays in obtaining permits,  while the estimated building costs escalated,  Galdikas and Shapiro decided to instead send Rusti to the Center for Orangutan and Chimpanzee Conservation in Florida.

But that plan also fell through.

Eventually the Honolulu Zoo built a 4,000-square-foot exhibit for Rusti,  surrounding a tall banyan tree near the tortoises exhibit,  and introduced him to a companion,  a female hybrid orangutan named Violet.

At last report,  Rusti had just celebrated his 46th birthday as the Honolulu Zoo’s star attraction.

Peter Singer

Galdikas found herself in another controversy when Peter Singer,  author of the 1975 tome Animal Liberation,  in a 2005 essay entitled “Heavy Petting” described having attended a conference where a woman claimed to have been sexually assaulted by an orangutan while visiting Camp Leakey.

“When she called out for help,”  summarized conservative syndicated political columnist Wesley J. Smith,  a longtime advocate of “human exceptionalism” and critic of animal advocacy,  “the operator of the facility,  a woman named Birute Galdikas,  told the distraught woman not to worry because orangutans are not well endowed.  The animal lost interest before completing the assault.

“This lack of concern deeply impressed Singer,”  wrote Smith.

Contended Singer,  “Galdikas understands very well that we are animals,  indeed more specifically,  we are great apes.  This does not make sex across the species barrier normal,  or natural,  whatever those much-misused words may mean,  but it does imply that it ceases to be an offense to our status and dignity as human beings.”

Concluded Smith,  “In other words,  bestiality is fine,  for those who are attracted to that sort of thing,  because it merely constitutes two animals rubbing body parts.”

“Palm oil is the number one enemy of orangutans”

The palm oil industry,  rapidly converting logged-off Indonesian forests to plantations to supply fast-growing demand for palm oil as a clean-burning diesel fuel,  enjoyed the opportunity to try to defame and discredit Galdikas,  but she became the star of an international campaign against palm oil anyway.

“Palm oil is the number one enemy of orangutans and all wildlife in Borneo,”
Galdikas, told Agence France Presse in 2005.

“Time is running out for the orangutans,”  Galdikas warned,  “because the palm oil plantations are spreading.  Illegal logging may seem horrific,  but at least illegal logging leaves some canopy in place.  Palm oil plantations leave nothing.”

“We just can’t find homes for all of them”

Galdikas and Orangutan Foundation International stepped up their efforts to rescue orphaned orangutan babies,  but “We just can’t find homes for all of them,”  Galdikas lamented to The Independent in February 2007.

Both the Bornean orangutan,  listed as “highly endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature & Natural Resources,  and the Sumatran orangutan,  listed as “critically endangered,”  were and are jeopardized by the palm oil boom.

“We are looking at the extinction of orangutans in the wild,”  Galdikas predicted.  “When they goes extinct,  it will be a terrible loss.  I can’t tell you how urgent it is.

“But I’m not saying they cannot be saved,”  Galdikas emphasized.  “This is possible if all the necessary steps are taken seriously.”

“Kick-boxing” orangutans rescued from Thailand

Later in 2007 Galdikas again intervened on behalf of captive orangutans.

“Four orangutans who had once been forced to perform at a Bangkok amusement park returned to their native Indonesia in the care of one of their staunchest allies,”  reported Darren Samuelsohn for Greenwire.

“The renowned primatologist Biruté Mary Galdikas traveled to Thailand to bring the apes home,”  Samuelsohn recounted.

“The four apes whom Galdikas rescued from Thailand were part of a larger group who wore boxing trunks and gloves and kickboxed at the Safari World amusement park,”  Samuelsohn explained.

“Five were left behind”

“In 2004, journalists videotaped the orangutan fights and sparked a rescue campaign.

“While the amusement park’s owners claimed the animals had been born in captivity and were legally theirs,  DNA tests revealed the apes were wild natives of Borneo.

“During the legal battle that followed,”  Samuelsohn continued,  “about half of the animals disappeared into a lucrative underworld that typically includes cartels operating in drugs and human trafficking. Forty-eight apes returned to Indonesia in November 2006, where First Lady Kristiani Yudhoyono welcomed them at the airport in Jakarta.

“But five of the orangutans were left in Thailand,”  Samuelsohn said,  one of whom died before Galdikas raised the funds to bring them to the Orangutan Foundation International rehabilitation center “just outside the village of Pangkalan Bun,”  Samuelsohn specified,  by then “home to about 330 apes, including the four former kickboxers.

“Zoo,  vet hospital,  & nursery school”

“Galdikas’ facility is something of a cross between a zoo,  a veterinary hospital and a nursery school,”  Samuelsohn described.

“Volunteers and employees guide younger orangutans into adjacent forests to reacquaint them with tree climbing and nest building.  The animals sometimes walk next to their caretakers,  holding hands.  The smallest ones are often carried.

“Down a narrow wood-plank trail,  about a mile from the main camp,”  Samuelsohn added,  “live both wild and recently released orangutans. A housing development is starting to encroach on the property.  The residents sometimes feed the orangutans fried bananas.”

Admitted Galdikas to Associated Press writer Robin McDowell in 2009,   “I try not to get depressed.  I try not to get burned out.  But when you get up in the air you start gasping in horror; there’s nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be lush rain forest.  Elsewhere,  there’s burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park.

Regretted lack of Goodall’s fundraising skill

“It is getting harder and harder to find good,  safe forest in which to free them,”  Galdikas said of the rehabilitated orangutans.

Wrote McDowell,  “Galdikas says one of her great regrets is that she does not share Goodall’s skills in raising awareness and funds for the great apes.”

Said Galdikas,  “If they go extinct, we will have one less kin to call our own in this world.  “And do we really want to be alone on this planet?”

Galdikas took heart,  however,  when her Nature Conservancy critic Eric Meijaard and others discovered a previously unknown population of as many as 2,000 orangutans,  eventually identified as a new subspecies,  in “forests nestled between jagged limestone cliffs on the eastern edge of Borneo island,”  McDowell disclosed.

“Yes, finding a population that science did not know about is significant, especially one of this size,”  Galdikas told McDowell.

Approved of iPads for zoo orangutans

Galdikas campaigned in her later years for oil palm plantation developers to leave orangutans untouched buffer strips of native forest.

“Don’t totally clear the forest.  The orangutan can survive in fragments of forest,  so leave them a bit of it,”  Galdikas pleaded to Malaysia Star reporter Sharon Ling in November 2009.

Galdikas also continued to monitor the care of captive orangutans.

In 2012,  the Jungle Island zoo in Miami,  Florida issued iPads to six orangutans as part of a mental stimulus program.  The younger orangutans reportedly learned to use them right away,  playing games with them and drawing,  observed David Fisher of Associated Press,  “but the clan’s elders show no interest.”

Responded Galdikas,  “Anything that Jungle Island can do to help their orangutans while away the day is to be commended.  IPads seem to work for humans.  It’s not surprising that orangutans,  who share 97 percent of their genetic material with humans,  like them, too.”

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