LEMURS

Today I head to Gombe whenever I'm able to escape from a schedule that keeps me lecturing and traveling more than 300 days a year, spreading the word about the plight of chimpanzees in the wild and in captivity. I like to walk alone to an area called the Peak, close to where the chimpanzee I named David Greybeard first accepted me 43 years ago. He was the first individual I saw making a grass stem to fish termites out of their nest, an observation that prompted Leakey's famous remark: "Now we must redefine Man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans." When David Greybeard died of pneumonia in 1968, I mourned for him as I have for no other chimpanzee.

Even after all these years, the vivid Gombe characters continue to surprise and delight us. Last October, Fifi, the only surviving chimpanzee I knew as an infant in the early 1960s, delivered her ninth offspring at age 44. Most females don't raise more than two or three offspring to reproductive maturity, but Fifi has four adult offspring, two healthy adolescents, a juvenile, and now a brand new infant. Her high rank allows her to control a particularly food-rich patch of habitat in the central Kakombe Valley, which contributes to her phenomenal breeding success. All but one of her offspring have survived, includingYou probably already knew that chimpanzees are humans' closest relatives in the animal kingdom.