The Wandering Gorillas by Alan Goodall / William Collins Sons & Co. 1979 / Hardcover

Hardcover 1979

ISBN: 9780002162654  /  978-0002162654

ISBN-10: 0002162652

PAGES: 253

PUBLISHER: Collins

LANGUAGE: English

English Description:

In many ways gorillas are the most spectacular of all wild animals. They are enormous, mysterious and secretive, they have many uncanny resemblances to ourselves and their aggressive displays can be both noisy and terrifying.
Alan Goodall, a biologist, had the good fortune to conduct the first study to compare two populations of gorillas that have become habituated to man.
For eight months he lived in a camp among the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda, where Dian Fossey had just started her pioneer studies. It was here that he caught his first sight of the mountain gorillas and experienced their nerve-shattering charges. His observations of these superb animals, their social habits and their often-tragic interactions with the people who surround them make absorbing reading.
However, perhaps Alan Goodall's most dramatic experiences, and the ones which contribute a new insight to these mountain giants and their relationship with man, were in Zaire (now Congo). During the troubles that followed independence from Belgiun, Adrien Deschryver, fought to preserve the gorillas of Kahuzi-Biega and won acceptance by the government for the reserve he had established. In 1970, the Zaire government gave it the status of a national park. Deschryver had, over several years, partially habituated two families of gorillas to observation and close contact with human beings. This habituation process made possible the author's almost daily study of one of those families - the one led by the silverback (named Casimir by Deschryver) who was later to become world famous in Anglia Television's film ‘Gorilla’

This book builds up an enthralling picture of gorillas in their forest home: how they find their food and what they eat, how they behave with each other, how populations differ in habit and, above all, how they are now dependent upon, and yet threatened, by man.

About the Author:

In his final honours year at Liverpool University in 1970 Alan Goodall became fascinated by the new research area of Ethology (Animal Behaviour studies) and wrote to Professor Robert Hinde at Cambridge University about research studentships in his department. His letter was passed on to Dian Fossey, who was then visiting Cambridge - and looking for a research student to help her with field work on the rare mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Central Africa. Alan's interviews went well and he was accepted by Dian and Dr Louis Leakey to join her research. He won a NATO overseas scholarship for a doctoral research project on the mountain gorillas. Alan's first book "THe Wandering Gorillas" was published by Wm. Collins in 1979. It had great reviews in the International press. It is now out of print - but, Alan has now published it here on Amazon as an ePub file. It is now in it's second edition with an Afterword "Tragedies in the mist - who killed Dian Fossey and why"

Since his first research there in 1970 Dr Alan Goodall has since been involved with Rwanda during various periods over the past forty years. His second book "Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda" is a photo essay of some of the major events he has been involved in during this period.