Remembering Birute Galdikas

A short note on the passing of Dr Biruté Galdikas 

Written by Felicity Oram

10 May 1946 – 24 March 2026

Although I never worked directly with Dr Galdikas, she has inspired me since the earliest stages of my career, first as an orangutan zookeeper and later as a wild orangutan researcher and conservation practitioner. I was fortunate to cross paths with her several times between 1980 and 2018. I always admired her tenacity, and her unwavering respect for the species.

Before Biruté Galdikas set foot in the rainforests of Indonesian Borneo in 1971, most believed that scientific study of wild orangutans in their natural habitat was unfeasible, given their predominantly arboreal lifestyle, solitary foraging behaviour, and highly diffuse fission-fusion social structure. Yet, over the next fifty-five years, her groundbreaking work became the bedrock for generations of researchers and conservationists across Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond. Dr Galdikas did more than mentor and inspire scientists; she unveiled the hidden wonders and intricate lives of orangutans for general audiences, inviting the world to marvel at their intelligence and grace. Alongside the other legendary “Trimates” championed by Louis Leakey and National Geographic—Jane Goodall with chimpanzees and Diane Fossey with mountain gorillas—she helped the world fall in love with the only Asian great ape, which at least in the 1970s appeared to be arguably the most elusive of the great apes.

Over her career Dr Galdikas also weathered the real world challenges faced by these forest-dependent animals due to wide scale human encroachment on their habitat in the form of logging and forest conversion to agriculture, She also did not shy away from trying to address the fallout of this human mediated landscape change in the form of thousands of displaced and often orphaned young orangutans in need of care. For this she did not escape controversy.

Nevertheless, her enduring legacy is her groundbreaking scientific work and passionate advocacy to recognise the privilege we still have of sharing our world with the orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra. Without her pioneering spirit, our understanding of the lives and challenges faced by of these remarkable apes would be a shadow of what it is today.

This link https://orangutan.org/50-years-in-the-field/ is a retrospective presentation by Dr Galdikas of her career told through her experiences of key wild orangutans who shaped her research and personal journey.

This other link https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/birute-galdikas-dead-orangutan-9.7141747 presents an overview of her contribution to primatology.

Biruté Mary Galdikas on the porch at Camp Leakey in 2015. Courtesy of Orangutan Foundation International.