Prior to her fame, the Canadian primatologist and anthropologist Biruté Mary Galdikas, along with her husband, Rod Brindamour came to the Tanjung Puting Reserve in Indonesian Borneo when the forest was under siege. The year was 1971, and coming to this tropical, humid rainforest would have sounded almost surreal. There was no telephone, road, electricity, television or postal service. And Illegal logging and hunting were stripping animals of the forests they depended on for survival.
However, they came to study orangutans, an exceptionally intelligent non-human species found only in Borneo and Sumatra, whose habitat was also under threat. The orangutans Galdikas had come to study were considered particularly difficult subjects, elusive, wary and living largely in dense, swampy forests.
