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Gorillas in the Virunga Mountains. Dian Fossey came to study the endangered mountain gorilla population in the late 1960s and returned until she was killed in 1985. | Credit: Brent Stirton/Getty Images for WWF-Canon
FAST FACTS
Stage: Dian Fossey was found murdered
Date: December 27, 1985
Where: Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda
WHO: The criminal remains unknown
In late December 1985, a worker opened the door of a remote cabin in Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains to find a horrific scene: gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, whose aggressive approach to conservation had put her at odds with the local community, had been killed with a machete and her cabin ransacked.
Fossey has worked with an endangered gorilla population in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park since the late 1960s. Along with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, she was one of three “trimates” chosen by Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural habitat.
Fossey had no formal training in ethology, the science of animal behavior, when he set out for Africa. He began his fieldwork in Kabara, Congo, living in a small tent and venturing out to study mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) There. After the outbreak of civil war in 1967, she escaped to the highlands of Rwanda and set up a new research project near Mount Karisimbi in Rwanda.
Fossey was inspired by the work of George Schaller, a biologist who, in 1959, had also studied the gorillas of the Virunga Mountains.
“I knew that animals try to stay away from you. If you walk quietly near them, they come to accept your presence. That’s what I did with the gorillas. I just approached them day by day, which was quite easy because they form cohesive social groups. Soon, I knew them as individuals, both their faces and their behavior, and I sat and watched them in a Schaller.” 2006 interview.
Fossey operated on the same principle of patient and discreet observation. However, the gorillas initially ran away from her, and she spent hours tracking and chasing them through the misty forest.
Dian Fossey in 1983, the year her book Gorillas in the Mist came out. Fossey’s aggressive tactics to protect the gorillas did not endear him to the locals. | Credit: Peter Breining/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
After a year, they stopped running away from her presence and started beating their chests and vocalizing. It was a bluff meant to scare her, but it was still far from their usual, natural behavior, she said in a 1973 lecture. After two years, he got two young gorillas, Coco and Pucker; rehabilitated them; and learned about young gorillas by observing them.
“I got to know the gorillas’ need for love and affection and the young gorillas’ need for constant play,” she said.
It will take three years for the gorillas to come to terms with her presence and exhibit more naturalistic behavior, she said in the lecture.
During her decades in Virunga, Fossey described and learned to imitate gorilla vocalizationsincluding the “burp vocalization” signifying contentment. She also elucidated their tight family structures, courtship and mating ritualsas well as documented the occasional killing of infants by gorillas by rival males.
Although he eventually earned his doctorate in zoology at the University of Cambridge, Fossey spent his early years studying gorillas without any formal training. Perhaps because of her initial lack of training, she formed close bonds with individual animals and tended to attribute more human-like motivations and descriptions to their actions than is usually accepted in formal zoology. She often described gorillas as more altruistic than humans.
“Take these fine, regal animals,” she reportedly told an interviewer The New York Times. How many fathers have the same sense of fatherhood? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is incredibly strong.”
She formed a particularly close bond with a gorilla she nicknamed Digit – named after his damaged finger — who had no playmates his own age. Digit was killed by poachers in 1977.
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The last years of Fossey’s life were increasingly focused on conserving the gorillas’ dwindling habitat and fighting poaching. She used confrontational methods such as burning traps, wearing masks to scare off poachers and spray painting to prevent herders from bringing them into the national park, according to Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
She also shot over the heads of tourists to scare them off and told her graduate students to carry guns, according to The Washington Post.
With many of the people living on the fringes of the park living in poverty and resorting to grazing and herding to survive, this did not endear him to many of the locals.
Fossey’s murder was never solved. Many believe poachers were responsible for the killing, but others theories were also presented.