HOMESICK FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN: The Life of George B. Schaller, by Miriam Horn
In 1959, when the 26-year-old George Schaller arrived in the Belgian Congo as a graduate student in zoology, the little that was known about mountain gorillas came almost exclusively from the study of dead ones. The very idea of observing — rather than trapping or shooting — the massive, chest-beating primates was considered foolhardy. Some experts advised Schaller to wear armor; everyone thought he should carry a weapon. Instead, he took a local tracker’s advice: If one charges, “don’t run.”
Schaller didn’t just hold his ground; he settled into the dense jungle of the Virunga Mountains and became a familiar, unguarded presence for over 400 hours, recording the gorilla world as no one ever had. He collected every sort of data about their habits — from what they ate and excreted to how they roamed, played and mated — and he observed them with a novelist’s eye. “The animals ceased to be anonymous members of a species,” Schaller later wrote, “and became individuals, each with foibles, sensitivities, problems, family ties, traditions and past experiences.”
Schaller, now 92, can’t be credited with inventing modern field biology, but he is certainly its most ambitious and fabled practitioner. Across 32 countries and some seven decades, he has studied not just primates but tigers, lions, wild dogs, cheetahs, snow leopards, jaguars and giant pandas — to say nothing of wild sheep, antelopes and gazelles. His work has taken him to seemingly every extreme clime, from the steamy wetlands of Brazil to the heights of the Tibetan plateau.
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.
Horn’s biography is a celebration of the great naturalist’s achievements, but there is a melancholy arc to her tale. George and Kay Schaller were lifelong partners, and the book’s most charming passages describe their early years together in Congo, India and the Serengeti, gamely roughing it while raising two sons. Kay continued to spend time with him in the field and, as he often noted, was essential to his research and writing. But with the passing decades, as George’s work kept him abroad for months at a time, her correspondence took on a plaintive tone, declaring her loneliness and sense of isolation. As Kay (who died in 2023) wrote in an unpublished essay discovered by Horn, it was “ironic to marry someone whose dreams seem to match so well with your own and then see them carry him away.”
The greater tragedy, as Schaller himself recognized, is the fate of the animals he came to know so intimately. His deft diplomacy on their behalf has given them a fighting chance, with protected parks in China, Afghanistan and a half-dozen other countries — amounting to over 200,000 square miles. More important still are the generations of local conservationists and wildlife scientists that Schaller encouraged and helped to train — and the governments that now see wildlife parks as a source of both revenue and national pride.
But as Horn concludes, “the disaster that Schaller witnessed across decades grows ever more dire,” with a million species worldwide on a “spiral to extinction” in the face of overhunting, habitat destruction and climate change. Schaller found his deepest satisfactions by disappearing into the last wildernesses, his eyes wide open. We could all stand to learn from his humility.
HOMESICK FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN: The Life of George B. Schaller | By Miriam Horn | Penguin Press | 630 pp. | $40
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