Harcourt was holidaying in the Congo with her mother, Gloria McLean, an animal rights activist, and sister Judy. Her love for gorillas began following a close encounter with eastern lowland gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri) in the Congo. In the late 1960s, Harcourt, daughter of Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart, became a student of Fossey at Karisoke (she spent her summer holidays from Stanford University excavating fossils at Lake Rudolph, now Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya with Richard Leakey). In late 1967, when political crisis in the Congo forced Fossey to relocate her fieldwork to Rwanda, she established the Karisoke Research Station on the foothills of Mt.Visoke, a cold, muddy and dark volcano that rises 3,000 meters into the mist.Īmerican primatologist Kelly Stewart Harcourt knew Fossey well at the time. Congo side of Parc National des Virunga, which resulted in the publication of The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior. In 1959, the legendary American naturalist George Schaller began a year’s natural history study on the D. For almost two decades, she undertook an extensive study of mountain gorillas at the Karisoke Research Station, the longest of any field naturalist.įossey wasn’t the first to study mountain gorillas in the field.
In the early morning hours of 27th December 1985, Dian Fossey, by then one of the world’s celebrated naturalist and bestselling author of Gorillas in the Mist was brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on the slopes of the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda’s northern Ruhengeri Province.įossey was recognized as the world's leading authority on the physiology and behavior of the rare and critically endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei)-one of our closet living relatives. This year also marks the eighty-fifth anniversary of her birth. In spite of her complex personality, Fossey gave her life in order to protect one of humanity’s closest living relatives. She went on to make ground-breaking discoveries about gorillas including how females transfer from group to group over the decades, gorilla vocalisation, hierarchies and social relationships among groups, rare infanticide, gorilla diet, and how gorillas recycle nutrients. For almost two decades, she single-handedly pioneered the study of the rare and critically endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei). Helping communities living near gorillas through education, livelihoods, and food and water security initiatives.Half a century ago, the controversial American primatologist Dian Fossey established her field camp in the midst of two volcanoes in Rwanda.Training future leaders to address conservation challenges.Conducting critical science needed to develop conservation strategies.Daily protection of individual gorillas and their families.The Fossey Fund’s people-centered approach to conservation is focused on four pillars: Instead, they are recognized as one of the world’s few conservation success stories and have moved from “critically endangered” status to “endangered,” one step further from extinction. When Dian Fossey began her groundbreaking work, it was predicted that mountain gorillas would be extinct by the year 2000.
With a team of more than 300 staff working in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Fossey Fund is the world’s longest-running and largest organization dedicated entirely to gorilla conservation. Established in 1967 by famed primatologist Dian Fossey, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund works to protect and study wild gorillas and their habitats, and to empower people who live nearby.
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