As Miriam Horn writes in her engaging, often lyrical account of his life, “Homesick for a World Unknown,” Schaller “transformed scientific practice,” achieving an extraordinary intimacy with his animal subjects by “assimilating to their rhythms and rules, endeavoring to see the universe through their eyes.” He also became a relentless advocate for conservation, fighting to protect the vanishing wild spaces necessary for the survival of his charismatic fauna. Schaller chronicled these encounters in more than 20 books, both scientific and popular, including classics like “The Year of the Gorilla” and “The Serengeti Lion,” which won the 1973 National Book Award.
Horn, a writer on environmental themes who previously worked for conservation groups, has obvious affection and admiration for her subject and his late wife, Kay, who often shared the dangers and deprivations of his long career. Both cooperated with the project, giving the author access to intimate family correspondence. But as Horn makes clear, despite her subject’s voluminous bibliography and more than 20,000 pages of accumulated field notes, the awkward, taciturn Schaller remains for her something of an “opaque creature,” not unlike those whose lives he devoted himself to understanding.
Horn suggests that his radical empathy for animals and legendary toughness in the field sprang in part from the dislocations of his own childhood. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American woman who had married a minor German diplomat in Hitler’s service, Schaller learned early to fend for himself in the face of bombings, evacuations, food shortages and family separation. Deposited with relatives in Missouri at the age of 14, the young “enemy alien” soon found refuge in a life of collecting, hunting and observing the natural world. As one cousin remarked, “I think he became resigned to loneliness,” focusing on the outside world rather than dealing with pain.
Horn sees a therapeutic, even spiritual element in Schaller’s connection to nature, but she doesn’t romanticize his work. His famed empirical rigor consisted in no small part of sifting through scat, analyzing the contents of viscera and measuring jawbones. The terrains he explored were alive with leeches, ticks, maggots, ants and every kind of vermin, along with such botanical delights as stinging nettles and thorny bramble. To bait the big cats he studied, he would tie up live goats and sheep as prey, eager to hear the crunch of bone. And his observations required an almost monastic degree of patience, persistence and self-denial. He would wait for days, weeks or sometimes months in order to glimpse those animals too shy to appear — or, increasingly, as the years went by, too few to easily find.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
