"There was an older female named Priscilla. Galdikas said it took years for some wild orangutans to become accustomed to her presence.
The epic story of 3 legendary women who fought to save the great apes & inspired a generation. Wild orangutans are not used to humans, and when they spotted Galdikas, they often moved away as quickly as they could. She subsequently tracked down other orangutans in the area, and she'd try to follow them as they went about their lives. The interaction only lasted about a minute, but Galdikas was hooked. "We were in a boat and the orangutan immediately moved away from the river, squeaked - she didn't throw any branches, but she moved away very rapidly," she said. The first time Galdikas saw an orangutan, it was by a river's edge. In recounting her own experiences along with those of the three brave women whose lives she evokes, she suggests what it is that their mentor, Louis Leakey, saw in them, and in the nature of women, that set Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas among the most celebrated scientists of our age.An adult male Bornean orangutan, pictured here in Tanjung Puting National Park, Borneo, Indonesia. In researching Walking with the Great Apes, Montgomery walked the same earth as her heroines and, like them, has worked with the same apes in the wilds of Africa and Borneo. 
This is a biography of the women, but also, more importantly, it is a biography of their relationships with the animals, and how those relationships changed the way we view the differences between human and non-human animals. Jane Goodall, studying the chimpanzees of Gombe Dian Fossey, living among the mountain gorillas of the Virunga volcanoes and Birute Galdikas, chronicling the lives of Bornean orangutans-all three women used their relationships with their study animals as tools of inquiry, and the results astonished the world. Three women in our time have invented a revolutionary way to conduct the science of primate ethology: dedicating their lives to a single species and living as close to the earth and trees as the great apes themselves. Perhaps this names the unease that some people feel : that these women would be transformed, and then leave us to go wild.” “Daily they made the pilgrimage into the animals’ universe, not only to probe and record, but to enter and join.
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