Galdikas was born in Germany while her parents were enroute from Lithuania to Canada.

She grew up in Toronto, Canada.

Spends half the year in Borneo.

Sweat pours down her face. She feels thirsty. Swatting at mosquitoes, Biruté Galdikas balances on a slippery log. The logs are always slippery. I don’t know why, but they always are, she thinks. Then she tries to avoid a thorn vine and a tree with toxic bark as she trudges through the dark dank rain forest. She stands waist-deep in tea-coloured swamp water, her joggers, socks and jeans soaking wet. Two pairs of socks, one tucked under and one pulled over her jeans, keep out leeches and other unspeakable menaces which thrive in the murky water. She’s wearing a khaki long sleeved shirt with lots of pockets and a cotton jungle hat she bought at an army surplus store.
Catching her breath as she stands in the swamp, she spots two huge male orangutans standing face to face, glaring at each other’s massive cheek pads. They’re not that close but she can tell they are ready to fight for the chance to mate with the female that Galdikas has been tracking for days. Actually, she can only glimpse their shifting shadowy forms in the dense foliage. The sounds are horrific: snarling, grunting, loud and frightening. They wrestle and tumble, smashing through the brush, trying to bite each other on the head and shoulders. Finally, one flees into the bush. Moving forward to see, Galdikas snaps a twig distracting the other one. Suddenly, he grabs two thick vines, swings down until he hangs only a metre above her head and stares into her eyes, so close that her nostrils tingle from the stale odour of his sweat.
In 22 years of jungle observations, Galdikas has had only a handful of such close encounters, so rare are orangutan’s meetings with humans or even with each other. But this fellow’s message was clear: “Leave me alone.”
Galdikas has learned more than any other human being about what it means to be an orangutan, and what she has found out is that orangutans like to be left alone. An adult male’s range is at least 40 square kilometres and he can spend weeks loping slowly from tree to tree eating fruits, nuts, insects, leaves and bark without ever meeting any of his kin.
Biruté Galdikas has devoted her life to studying Orangutans. She wanted to know why these great apes did not evolve the way our ancestors did into human beings. Human beings evolved from a different type of ancestral ape that learned how to live together in communities. Orangutans never learned this. They have not changed in millions of years because the forests where they live have not changed. They have always had enough food and space to continue their solitary existence.

As A Young Scientist...  

Ever since she was 5, Biruté Galdikas wondered where human beings came from. She knew they came from ancient apes but she wanted to know more. When she was 12 years old she loved to go into the wilder sections of High Park in Toronto. She would pretend she was a Huron or Iroquois Native slipping through the woods, at one with nature. She spent hours like this, quietly and secretly observing the wild animals in the park.
When she went to university, she combined her love of nature with her curiosity about the great apes and studied psychology and biology. At 22, while she was working on her masters degree in anthropology at the University of California in Los Angeles, Galdikas met Dr. Louis Leakey who is famous for discovering fossils of early humans in Africa. Leakey and the National Geographic Society helped Galdikas set up a research camp in Borneo to study orangutans. Her husband, Pak Bohap, a Dayak rice farmer in Borneo is a tribal president and co-director of the orangutan program there.

Galdikas is an anthropologist. Anthropology is the study of human beings, but Galdikas studies physical anthropology, looking to our evolutionary ancestors and relatives, the great apes, to help understand the mysteries of human nature. Galdikas has been living in the rain forest among the orangutans for the last 24 years. During this time she founded orangutan support groups all over the world and became a professor at Simon Fraser University.

She has written articles for National Geographic, Science and other journals and has just finished a book on orangutans.