Me, Jane

Her life story may be tough to condense in two pages, but Jane Goodall wants her message of conservation to be what she’s best known for.

HOW SHOULD ONE write a profile of the primatologist and conservationist Dame Jane Goodall?

You could start where she often does in her presentations, introducing herself in fluent chimpanzee pant-hoots and then retelling her now legendary tale of how, at age four-and-half, she hid in a hen house in the English countryside for hours waiting to observe how eggs emerged from the fowls, forcing her mother to call in the police to locate the missing child (“Isn’t that the making of a little scientist?” she asks the audience. “Curiosity, asking questions, not getting the right answer, and deciding to find out for yourself.”) Or how, at 10, she discovered the book Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, “fell passionately in love with the glorious lord of the jungle, and was horribly jealous because he married the wrong Jane.”

What about her 21-day journey by ship from the dankness of England to equatorial eastern Africa in 1957, at just 23 years old, and later becoming a protégé of Kenyan paleoanthropologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey? Or the 26 years she spent observing chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, where she made the breakthrough discovery — on noticing David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee that trusted “this peculiar white ape,” breaking off twigs, stripping them of leaves and using the bare sticks to fish termites from underground nests — that the ability to create and use tools wasn’t Homo sapiens’ exclusive domain?

In the words of another great Dame, Shirley Bassey: Where do I begin?