Biruté Galdikas

Birutė Marija Filomena Galdikas was born on 10 May 1946 in Wiesbaden, in what was then Allied-occupied Germany. Her parents, Antanas and Filomena Galdikas (née Slapsis), were Lithuanian refugees who had fled the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states after the Second World War. The Guardian describes her father as a house painter and her mother as a nurse; other accounts say her father worked as a miner and contractor in Canada.

When she was two, the family emigrated to Canada, where her father had signed a contract to work in copper mining in Quebec. A year later they settled in Toronto, where she grew up with two younger brothers and a younger sister, Aldona. The first book she borrowed from the Toronto Public Library was a story about Curious George, and she later said she decided early on that she wanted to be an explorer. As a teenager she was inspired by the National Geographic reports of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. The family moved to Vancouver in 1962.

Galdikas began university at the University of British Columbia before her family moved to the United States, where she enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She studied psychology and zoology and received her bachelor's degrees in 1966. She earned a master's degree in anthropology from UCLA in 1969.

During her graduate studies she met the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and proposed a long-term study of orangutans in their natural habitat. Leakey had reservations at first but agreed to help and secured support from the National Geographic Society. Her Borneo fieldwork became the basis of her doctorate in anthropology, awarded by UCLA in 1978 for the thesis Orangutan Adaptation at Tanjung Puting Reserve, Central Borneo. That same year she published her first scientific article on orangutans in the journal Science.

In 1971, at the age of 25, Galdikas and her husband, the photographer Rod Brindamour, arrived in the Tanjung Puting Reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. Nobody they knew had been there. "So it was really a voyage into terra incognita," she later said. The swamps were waist deep and full of leeches, and the camp they built near the Java Sea was named Camp Leakey in honour of her mentor.

She was the third of Leakey's "Trimates", also known as "Leakey's Angels", after Jane Goodall (chimpanzees) and Dian Fossey (gorillas). Before her work the orangutan was the least understood of the great apes. Following individual animals from before 6am until they built their night nests at dusk, she documented around 400 foods in their diet, how they organised their societies, fought and chose mates, and how they gave birth. She showed that fruit made up most of their diet, that females lived in loose matrilineal groups rather than in strict solitude, and that females at Tanjung Puting have an infant only every seven to eight years, the longest birth interval of any land mammal.

With later doctoral students including Gary Shapiro and Graham L. Banes, her program grew into one of the most comprehensive longitudinal datasets on any wild great ape population, spanning five generations of orangutans. Orangutan Foundation International describes it as the longest continuous, individually led field study of a single species in the wild.

She became Professor Extraordinaire at the National University (UNAS) in Jakarta in the 1970s and a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, in 1981. In 1986 she co-founded Orangutan Foundation International in Los Angeles, which she led as president, and in 1991 she organised the first Great Apes of the World Conference.

From the start Galdikas took in orphaned orangutans, many of them former illegal pets, and she established Indonesia's first large-scale, long-term orangutan rehabilitation program. CBC reported that her rehabilitation centre has helped around 450 captive orangutans return to the wild, and the Guardian reported that her foundation has contributed to the release of more than 1,000 rehabilitated orangutans and the rescue and relocation of about 200 wild ones.

She worked closely with the Indonesian government and helped secure the redesignation of Tanjung Puting Wildlife Reserve as Tanjung Puting National Park. She was an outspoken opponent of the logging, palm oil plantations, gold mining and fires destroying Borneo's rainforest. "I was struggling against an industry that was making billions of dollars," she said in 2025. "It did sometimes come to physical violence." She received death threats and was once kidnapped. By the time of her death OFI's work in Indonesia involved more than two hundred local staff and an educational outreach program run with the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry. In 2021 she became a patron of Lithuania's Ancient Woods Foundation (Sengirės fondas), which protects old-growth forests in her parents' homeland.

Galdikas met the Vancouver photographer Rod Brindamour in 1966 and married him around 1969 or 1970 (sources differ). He shared the first years at Camp Leakey and photographed her early work. Their son, Binti Brindamour, was born in Borneo in the mid-1970s. Brindamour left Indonesia in the late 1970s and the couple divorced in 1979, agreeing that he would raise Binti.

In 1981 she married Pak Bohap bin Jalan, an Indigenous Dayak rice farmer and community leader who had worked as a research assistant at Camp Leakey. He helped set up OFI's sister organisations and co-directed the orangutan program in Borneo. They had two children, Frederick Bohap Galdikas, who now leads OFI's Indonesian foundation, and Jane Filomena Galdikas, a physician named after Jane Goodall. Pak Bohap died on 17 April 2022. She divided her life between Borneo, British Columbia and Los Angeles, and had seven grandchildren.

Galdikas said her love of orangutans grew out of a desire to understand humanity itself. "So my love of orangutans grew out of my curiosity and urge to understand where we came from, where we're going and how we fit into the universe," she said in a 2019 CBC documentary. She was drawn to orangutans partly because of their eyes. "Their eyes have whites around the iris … just like humans," she said in 2011.

She believed in the sentience of animals and saw orangutan conservation as inseparable from protecting the planet, often saying, "Concern for orangutans means concern for the planet." She stressed that local people had to be at the heart of conservation and built her organisation around Indonesian staff. She also described herself as fortunate and spoke of her faith: "I still feel extraordinarily fortunate that God graced me with years in the forest."

Galdikas transformed the scientific picture of the orangutan, Asia's only great ape, from an almost unknown animal to one of the best studied wild primates. Researchers credit her with being among the first to argue that traits such as slow reproduction make orangutans especially vulnerable to habitat loss, an insight that shaped conservation strategy. Her rehabilitation methods became foundational for reintroduction programs, and OFI said her efforts helped preserve the largest remaining population of wild orangutans, the roughly 6,000 animals of Tanjung Puting.

With Goodall and Fossey she helped bring a female perspective into primatology, and she mentored generations of students at Simon Fraser University and in the field. After her death the Jane Goodall Institute, the Leakey Foundation, the Ape Alliance and National Geographic all paid tribute, and explore.org launched a matching scholarship fund in her name. Her work continues through Orangutan Foundation International, led in Indonesia by her son Frederick.

Her honours included the PETA Humanitarian Award (1990), Eddie Bauer Hero of the Earth (1991), the Sierra Club Chico Mendes Award (1992), the United Nations Global 500 Award (1993), appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada (1995), the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (1997, shared with Jane Goodall and George Schaller), the UCLA Professional Achievement Award (2001), the Institute of Human Origins Science Award, the Queen Elizabeth II commemorative medal, and Indonesia's Kalpataru (Hero for the Earth) and Satya Lencana awards, presented by the president of Indonesia. She was a finalist for the Indianapolis Prize in 2023 and 2025, received a key to the city of Las Vegas, and was awarded the Explorers Club Medal in 2025. In April 2026 the regent of Kotawaringin Barat presented a posthumous award honouring her and Pak Bohap as champions of conservation.

Books: Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo (1995), Orangutan Odyssey (1999) and Great Ape Odyssey (2005). She also wrote twice for the cover of National Geographic, in October 1975 ("Orangutans, Indonesia's People of the Forest") and June 1980 ("Living with Orangutans"), and contributed opinion writing to The New York Times.

Film and television: she starred in the IMAX documentary Born to Be Wild 3D (2011) and appeared in Orangutans: Grasping the Last Branch (1989), Terry Pratchett's Jungle Quest (1995), 30 Years of National Geographic Specials (1995), Beauty and the Beasts (Channel 4, 1996), Life and Times (CBC, 1996), PBS Nature (2005), The Last Trimate (2008) and She Walks with Apes (CBC The Nature of Things, 2019). Her story was told for young readers in Evelyn Gallardo's Among the Orangutans (1993) and Sy Montgomery's Walking with the Great Apes.

In the late 1990s Galdikas was criticised over her rehabilitation methods. Primatologists debated the issue online, and articles in Outside magazine (May 1998) and Newsweek (June 1998), later summarised in Linda Spalding's book A Dark Place in the Jungle, reported claims by Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry, with which she had clashed over logging policy, that she held a very large number of illegal orangutans in poor conditions, and the government considered formal charges. Critics also argued that she was too close to the orphans she raised and that this risked disease transmission. Galdikas denied the allegations, calling them "simply, wrong" and part of "a totally one-sided campaign against me." Later commentators, such as the University of Sussex researcher Gillian Forrester, noted that disease risks were less understood at the time and that human surrogate care is still often the only option for orphaned infants.

Galdikas died early on Tuesday 24 March 2026 in Los Angeles, aged 79, with loved ones by her side, including her children Frederick and Jane. Orangutan Foundation International said she had battled lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis, conditions likely exacerbated by her efforts to fight wildfires that ravaged orangutan habitat in Borneo.

Her body was flown to Pangkalan Bun in Central Kalimantan, where local officials received it at Iskandar Airport on 13 April 2026. After lying at the family home, she was buried on 15 April 2026 with Dayak Hindu Kaharingan rites, including the bapajuh offering and the Babukung dance, beside her late husband Pak Bohap bin Jalan in the grounds of the family home on Jalan Topar, Pasir Panjang village, Arut Selatan, Kotawaringin Barat. Hundreds of mourners attended, including representatives of Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry and the Central Kalimantan government. Her son Frederick told mourners that her last message to him was to keep caring for the orangutans.