Ian Redmond
Follow the Sun: From Monsoon Drains to Mountain Gorillas
A naturalist's childhood wonder becomes a lifetime of speaking for animals that cannot speak for themselves.
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Kintsugi Studio
Ian Redmond
A naturalist's childhood wonder becomes a lifetime of speaking for animals that cannot speak for themselves.
Hear this story
Ian Redmond describes himself as a naturalist by birth, biologist by training, and conservationist by necessity. As a toddler in Malaysia, he squeezed out of his nappy to explore monsoon drains. As a teenager in Yorkshire, he wrote letters to academics whose work fascinated him and hitchhiked to knock on university doors. One letter changed everything. At 21, muddy from army maneuvers in Germany, he received a reply from Dian Fossey offering him work at her gorilla research camp in Rwanda. He said yes.
In November 1976, Ian arrived at Karisoke in darkness, climbing through montane rainforest to find a cabin with an illuminated curtain. His first morning in the field, he and a tracker found fresh poacher signs and crept up on a campfire with only a police whistle. His first gorilla was an infant named Digit, playing in a tree. Ian learned to sketch nose prints to tell individuals apart. Fourteen months later, Digit was speared by poachers for his head and hands. Telling Diane Fossey felt like the second worst thing Ian had ever done.
Years later, Ian followed wild elephants into caves on Mount Elgon, becoming the first person to document what they do when no one is watching. He watched them deep underground, won their trust through patient presence, and had conversations with them using rumbles and body language. Since then, he has spent five decades in conservation work, pushing for international law to protect species that cross borders. His grief and anger over the animals he knew and loved have become fuel for protection that saves thousands of lives today.
“Fear is the enemy of curiosity. If they're not afraid, then they're curious. What are you? What? You know, so animals that come up and investigate you.”
“I describe myself as a naturalist by birth. I think naturalists are just born that way. They're kind of fascinated by nature and all life forms.”
“And when a friend is murdered, of course it is awful. And when I had to tell Diane, that was the second worst thing that ever happened to me.”
The hero, today
Ian learned from Dian Fossey that you cannot habituate wild animals to humans until they are safe from poachers, otherwise the fear response that keeps them alive cannot be removed. Winning the trust of a wild animal, whether gorilla or elephant, means they stop fleeing from you and become curious instead, which is when you see their natural behaviour rather than fear behaviour. The three practical things individuals can do are use the power of their purse by buying certified sustainable products, use their political power by writing to elected representatives about what they care about, and use their personal power by volunteering and taking action instead of living in despair. Forests and the animals that live in them are not ornaments but part of the life support system that keeps the planet healthy, providing oxygen, water, and the dispersal and fertilisation that ecosystems depend on. Ian has spent the past fifty years in conservation work because people and animals he knew and cared about were killed, and that grief and anger pushed him to work for international law to protect species that travel across country borders.
Yes. Ian Redmond is a real person who shared their own story in their own words. Kintsugi Heroes is a not-for-profit that shares first-person stories of overcoming adversity, told with the person's consent.
Kintsugi Heroes, a registered Australian not-for-profit. Every story is shared with the hero's own consent and reviewed under Kintsugi Heroes' trauma-informed content standard before it goes public.
Ian learned from Dian Fossey that you cannot habituate wild animals to humans until they are safe from poachers, otherwise the fear response that keeps them alive cannot be removed.
Winning the trust of a wild animal, whether gorilla or elephant, means they stop fleeing from you and become curious instead, which is when you see their natural behaviour rather than fear behaviour.
The three practical things individuals can do are use the power of their purse by buying certified sustainable products, use their political power by writing to elected representatives about what they care about, and use their personal power by volunteering and taking action instead of living in despair.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 00:05
Welcome to another episode of Animals and Us, where we explore and honor the awesomeness of animals and our relationships with them. Today's guest is Ian Redmond, one of the world's most respected conservationists. For more than 50 years, Ian has worked tirelessly to protect gorillas and elephants. He worked alongside the legendary Dian Fossey and later introduced Sir David Attenborough to wild gorillas. Ian now advises governments, leads international conservation initiatives, and serves as an ambassador for major environmental organizations across the world. But behind these extraordinary achievements is a deeply human story.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 00:48
Follow the sun.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 00:51
Good morning, Ian. It is such a privilege to have you as a guest on Animals and Us.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 00:55
You're very kind. Thanks for inviting me.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 00:57
Ian, we always start from people's beginning, from their childhood, because it's often one spark from childhood that began their relationship with animals. Can you tell us about your childhood?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 01:08
Sure, yes. I describe myself as a naturalist by birth. I think naturalists are just born that way. They're kind of fascinated by nature and all life forms. A biologist by training, a conservationist by necessity. So I'm usually described as a conservationist. That isn't my ambition. I want to just be a naturalist and enjoy nature. But as I'll explain various points along the way, other people with very different agendas have killed the animals I'm studying or destroyed the things which brought delight to me and many other people. And that's why we're in this situation where we're trying desperately to halt biodiversity loss and protect ecosystems. Partly because they're beautiful and people should be allowed to enjoy them in nature, but also partly because they're our life support system and that's what keeps the planet healthy. But my childhood was sort of, in one sense, wasn't what I would have wished. I was born in Malaya, as it then was, now Malaysia, and learned to walk there. But as a toddler, I was kidnapped and taken to England. Kidnapped by my parents. My dad was a pharmacist in the army. And he was working in a hospital in Kluang in Johor when I came along. And my parents separated when I was 4, and I grew up in Yorkshire in what is now called a one-parent household. I learned as a teenager that I was from a broken home. Well, I don't know from a broken home, I'm from a wonderful home. But my sister and I grew up in Yorkshire, most of our childhood in Beverley, which is a market town, and it's surrounded by pastureland and woodland. In East Yorkshire. So I grew up reading books about natural history elsewhere in the world, which all seemed to be more rich and biodiverse. And I always wished I had been brought up in Malaya because of the tropical wildlife there. My mum tells me that even as a toddler, even before I could get onto two legs, I was crawling around and would disappear into the monsoon drain. And if she couldn't find me, she'd look around the yard, then she'd go over to the monsoon drain and find my nappy because where the drain left our property, it was too narrow for my bottom and my nappy. So I squeezed my way out and she'd find a nappy there. And I was crawling down the drain. And I think I would have been fascinated by what I found there, all the creepy crawlies and things. And not a lot has changed. You know, I don't wear nappies now, but I'm still fascinated by creepy crawlies and I like going into unexplained, unexpected places.
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Forests and the animals that live in them are not ornaments but part of the life support system that keeps the planet healthy, providing oxygen, water, and the dispersal and fertilisation that ecosystems depend on.
This conversation includes a naturalist from birth, crawling down the monsoon drain, letters to researchers and a university door knock, herding reindeer in the cairngorms, the letter that changes everything and the cabin with the illuminated curtain.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 03:33
Yes, and you've evolved well from drains, haven't you, over the years, over the decades?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 03:38
Yeah, monsoon drains up to quite large caves. So yeah, I grew up bringing nature into my bedroom, and although my mum wasn't particularly a naturalist, she was encouraging— she was a teacher and she taught domestic science, so I had an early grounding in how to look after a house and how to cook and look after myself. But Yeah, I would bring caterpillars and tadpoles. And when I was a teenager, I learned of a company in the UK that sold eggs of insects so you could buy them through the post. And then you'd wait and they'd hatch out and then look after them. And so bringing nature into my domain and studying it was as important as going out into the fields and woods and watching it in the wild. I went to university in Keele in Staffordshire. Biology with geology. That was because I didn't get the grades to get to vet school, because any child who keeps animals is encouraged by their mother to become a vet because mothers have to pay the vet bills when your pet mouse, rabbit—
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 04:44
yes, there are benefits, family benefits.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 04:47
And as a teenager, I worked part-time in a veterinary surgery. Probably wouldn't be allowed today, but I used to help the vet hold the animals and stroking them while he treated them and walking the dogs because it was part of the kennels too. So I'd go out on a Saturday with half a dozen dog leads in each hand and come back with them completely flattened because the dogs would be moving in amongst the pack. So that was my childhood, it was a small childhood in Yorkshire enjoying nature then. I got into conservation by joining the local Natural History Society and going out on bird counts and beach bird surveys walking down the East Coast, learning to recognize waders, which I still struggle with, and, uh, helping a local conservation society clearing nature reserves of invasive plants and all that kind of thing. Yeah, so at university I discovered that I was quite good at organizing things, and I took on the role of secretary of the Biology Society and organized the speakers. And that was a wonderful thing because you read a paper by some academic about a species that interested you and you wrote to them. This was handwritten, no email in those days. So you write to them, post a letter and you get a reply back saying, yes, we'll come and talk to you. Right. So I met interesting people. I met a lady who studied reindeer in the Cairngorms, Dr. Ethel Lindgren, and she had studied the Lapp people. She's an anthropologist and in studying people in Lapland, fell in love with one of them and married him. So marrying one of your study animals, brought him to Scotland and he looked around at the hills in the Cairngorms and said, this is reindeer country. It's full of the kind of moss that, well, it's a lichen known as reindeer moss that they feed on. And so she and he reintroduced reindeer to the Cairngorms 400 years after they'd been there naturally. Were wiped out by people. And having invited him to speak at Keele, I said, 'Oh, could I come and help perhaps?' And so one summer I went and worked in the Cairngorms herding reindeer, which is fantastic, out on the tops, you know, striding over the hills and calling the reindeer. Because although they were living wild, they were semi-domesticated in that you could call them in and give them food supplements and make sure that they were okay.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 07:07
How did you actually herd them? What were you traveling on? On horses?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 07:11
On foot.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 07:12
The reindeer?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 07:13
On foot.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 07:13
On foot?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 07:14
Yeah. And I was taught to sort of give a yodeling call that echoed across the hillside and they would come running. And, you know, when reindeer run, the hooves click. So as they got closer and closer, you could hear the click, click, click, click, click of their hooves. And they were interested not in me, but in what they associated with that call, which was extra feed. Constantly feed with mineral supplements in it. So you scatter that around and they would be all around you milling. It was lovely. I remember once a lesson of the dangers of rubbish. A reindeer had found a tin and was trying to lick out whatever had been in it, and it caught a great lump of its lip and it needed stitching up. And so it involved bringing that individual down to the reindeer centre. And holding her while the vet stitched her up.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 08:07
Oh gosh!
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 08:08
You know, the one thing about the holiday in Scotland in the summer, or working in Scotland in the summer, is the midges. The midges are tiny little— or no-see-ums.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 08:17
Yes, we have midges in Australia.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 08:18
Yes, they bite and drink your blood. They don't drink a lot, you know, they're not greedy, but they're very irritating.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 08:24
Very annoying.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 08:25
But I had to hold her still, so I couldn't let go to swat the midges. So that's an abiding memory of that, holding this reindeer while the vet treated her and being absolutely bitten to death by midges. Delight was getting to know large mammals. You know, reindeer are beautiful animals, and learning how to lasso reindeer like a Laplander. They have a very different method of lasso than sort of whirling above your head American cowboy style. So I think I could still probably drop a noose over an antler. I wouldn't be able to do what the Lapps do. They sort of throw it and then guide it in flight to get the particular reindeer they want to lasso by one of its antlers.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 09:06
Not many people could claim they have lassoed and herded reindeer.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 09:11
Amazing experience. Recently. But anyway, that was fun. While I was in Gangorns, I joined in building a path through the Larygru where boot prints were causing path erosion, you know. There's a muddy bit, people walk around the muddy bit, so the muddy bit gets wider and wider until eventually you've got a huge area. What you need is a solid bit down the middle to guide the heavy boots of walkers where they're not, you know, eroding away the peat. And when it's steep, it actually becomes erosion. So we were putting in steps. Learning how to do that became very handy a few years later when I went to work in Mount Elgon National Park and built a path up to the cave, but a I'm getting ahead of myself, so we'll get to caves and elephants later.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 09:55
Yes, yes. So could we perhaps start with gorillas? How did gorillas enter your life?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 10:02
Well, when I was trying to get into university, having not got the grades necessary for veterinary school, someone advised me that at that point between universities receiving the results of the students who have applied there, and actually starting term. There's a period before what used to be called UCA, the University Central Clearing Admissions, tried to shuffle the students without a university and the universities who were short of students. There was that clearing process, and teachers said, well, if you're a lecturer in that situation, you can save a lot of time if someone actually comes and knocks on your door. So I hitchhiked around England knocking on the doors of university lecturers saying, These are my results. They ain't much, but they're what I've got. I had a very good A-level in biology and an S-level in biology, and then rubbish results in physics and chemistry. And my dad was still in the army then, running a territorial army unit in Stoke-on-Trent, 224 Field Ambulance. I got to know him as a teenager. I didn't know him during my childhood, but I went to stay with him and he said, 'And I thought about Keele.' I said, 'Never heard of Keele.' Keele University was a university in a village. The village had one pub, one post office, and a university. But it was one of the relatively new universities built in the grounds of a former stately home. And I went and knocked on the door of Professor Alan Gemmell, who was a very congenial Scottish guy who was quite famous because he appeared on Gardener's Question Time and had a lovely sort of Scottish Scottish brogue and knew his stuff about plants. But he offered me a place and that was how I got into uni. But while organizing the speakers for the Biology Society, I heard about someone who just studied gorillas for 2 years and was writing up his PhD at Cambridge. He was called Sandy Harcourt and I wrote to Dr. Sandy Harcourt just saying, you know, I've heard about your study, would you like to come and tell us about it? And he came and spoke to the Biology Society and being not much older than me. I put him up in my flat overnight, you know, visiting professors make their own arrangements or stay at university accommodation for visiting speakers. But Sandy just stayed over in my flat and I picked his brains and got— he'd been working with Diane Fossey, who wasn't so famous then as she ultimately became. I said, you know, could I possibly have Diane's address to write to her? And he gave me two bits of very good advice. He said, yeah, here's the address. Best not to mention my name because they'd fallen out big time. And he thought that wouldn't help. And he said, because Diane, she's set up Karisoke Research Center, 10,000 feet in the Virunga volcanoes. So 3,000 meters above sea level in habitat, not that dissimilar from the Cairngorms where I'd worked the previous summer, except more forest, more woodland. And in the UK, we've felled most of our forests hundreds of years ago. But in the mountains of Rwanda and Uganda and the Congo, it was montane rainforest with gorillas and elephants. And he said, well, when you live in a cabin in the woods at 10,000 feet, if something breaks, it stays broken. So you should mention it if you have any aptitude for mending things. And it turns out I am an impulsive fixer. I go around seeing broken electricians and fixing them in hotels all over the world. Because it's often a very simple fix. So I wrote again a handwritten letter to Diane, said I'm a naturalist, I hitchhiked around North America and Europe, I love nature, and if you want someone to mend the roof or make the tea, I'd be happy to come and help. And I pointed out to her that my academic supervisors didn't rate me very highly, but that I came to help. And later Diane said that she was forever getting letters from people saying, I'm a straight-A student, you need me, I'm the best student you're ever going to get. And to have someone write saying, well, my supervisors don't rate me, but I can fix things with a refractor. Anyway, so yeah, I got to Karasuki. Actually, that letter was written about 50 years ago now, because it was in early '76 when Sandy came to speak. And later this year, I have my personal 50th anniversary of when I went to Karasuki. In November '76, and I stayed there for a year and a half as Diane's research assistant stroke dog's body, you know, the camp gopher. Go for this, go for that.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 14:28
Ian, did you have to wait very long for Diane's reply? Because I imagine it would have been quite a delay from England to—
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 14:35
Until the summer, when I'd finished finals and before I got my results, which weren't much to write home about. I was, uh, I joined the TA, the Territorial Army, in the same unit at the time that my dad was the officer of, which is a bit strange, but it introduced me to that world. And as a medic, you learn first aid. They teach you first aid and they teach you how to drive and all sorts of useful skills. And you got a free pair of boots and a poncho. So for someone who likes hiking in the countryside, this free kit that the army would give you was very helpful. And it was True, when I got to Karisoke, in my bag was a pair of British Army boots and poncho. So the army helped in gorilla conservation by providing me with kit. And technically I was still in the TA. I could have been called up, but there was no global crisis at the time. And most action I saw was medical cover for infantry units doing exercises. And the medics were there in case somebody fell over and hurt themselves or put a bullet through their foot, which never happened. But So yes, Diane wrote back and I was on maneuvers with the 5th Light Infantry in Germany. I got back to the barracks after a night in a foxhole in the rain, in the mud. And because you're a medic, they don't give you thunder flashes. There are never enough blanks to go around. So when they shout, stand to, you're supposed to jump out of your sleeping bag, get in the foxhole. And if you hear someone there, you just have to shout halt. Advance one and be recognized. And if they don't advance, then you have to shout bang! The profit, the profit, the infantry have got the thunder flashes in the blanks. So I got back to barracks after a night in the mud shouting bang. And there on this rather saggy barracks bed was this brightly colored letter with stamps covered in animals and, you know, the colored airmail. And I sort of Tore it open and there was a letter from Dian Fossey saying essentially, if you can get here, we'll try you. No, yes, we'll fly you out to Rwanda. I had to get to Rwanda to go through a trial period, but that if I spent more than 3 months there, she would cover my Nairobi to Kigali airfare. In fact, I tried to hitchhike from, from Kenya but didn't get a lift, which is very frustrating. So I did eventually buy a one-way ticket from Nairobi to Kigali, and there was a coup in Burundi. So the planes were all grounded because they went from Nairobi to Rwanda to Burundi, back to Nairobi. They were grounded.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 17:06
What year was this, Ian, just so we can have context?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 17:09
In '76. It was sort of a portent of things to come. Political unrest disrupting activities in Africa. Anyway, so I get to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. And chatting to someone on the plane, got a lift into town. Diane had said, when you get to Nairobi, can you buy certain things, shopping items? I had a little shopping list and I'd bought things like glass cylinders for the paraffin pressure lamps. This was before rechargeable batteries, so we were pumping up paraffin under pressure and it was then squirted out into an anthill which was silk, and the silk burned, but the ash stayed in one place, and that's what glowed in those lamps. I don't know if you still have them in the outback in Australia, but they're very helpful. And the mantles are always breaking, of course, so you put a new mantle in, and the glass cylinders tend to get broken too. So I'd arrived with things like mantles and tinnits for lamps, and telegraphed, sent a telegram to Diane when the coup was over and the flights resumed, saying, this is when I arrive. And Diane said, when you come through the nearest town, which is then called Ruengiri, now the name has been changed to Musanze, when you come through Ruengiri, call in at the post office, because up at camp there is no regular postal service. It's the porters who bring supplies up who pick up the post, and an extra post delivery is a real treat. So I called into the post office, and there amongst the letters for Dr. Diane— well, not then doctor, Dian Fossey, was my telegram. So I got to deliver my own telegram. So the life at Karisoke was, for a naturalist, just a delight. And what was strange was I arrived at the base of the mountain at dusk. And Dian had said, ask the man who looks after the camp vehicle to organize a couple of porters to help carry your bags up and show you the way. So that happened, but it was dusk. So we're climbing up through the forest and you don't normally go walking in a mountain rainforest where there's buffalo and elephant in the dark. But that's what I had this letter from Dian Fossey. She was the zamou, the guard who looked after the van boss. So he organized the porters and they walked me up there in the rain and the mud, clambering over logs and trying not to be stung by the nettles and scraped by the brambles and thistles. And after a I don't know, an hour and a half of quite heavy going, climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing. It levels off. And then in a glade ahead was a little cabin with an illuminated curtain at the window, a patterned curtain. Looked like Hansel and Gretel, little house in the woods with a lighted curtain. And I go up and I knock on the door and I'm all ready to say, Dr. Fossey, I presume. So, Dr. Fossey. Oh, because it was a much younger woman than I was expecting, with whom I just had a conversation like this reminiscing about life at Karisoke. Looking for, uh, ecoflix, but we'll come to that in a minute. So Kelly said, no, I'm Kelly, Diane's cabin is further on, keep going past the fire pit until you come to a big cabin.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 20:11
I'm just trying to imagine, do you have torches for illumination so you knew where you were stepping?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 20:18
No, we were using natural light, so walking in a forest, if there's some starlight or moonlight, I don't remember if it was full moon, but we could see enough to walk in the woods, but exciting. You know, my first walk in an African rainforest. My mum used to say I'd had my fear glands removed at birth. So I wasn't, I was excited. One of the guys, the local Rwandan, didn't speak much French and certainly no English, but one of the guys carrying my, as we climbed over a log in the dark, he said, Mademoiselle, that's what they called Diane because she was unmarried, so she was Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle, elle est mal tête. She's crazy in the head. And I'd heard rumors about Diane being somewhat eccentric. So I said, okay, yeah. So I eventually knock on Diane's door and it opens an inch. And I say, Dr. Fossey, I presume, I've got my line out. Here's a telegram telling you that I'm coming. Yeah, so that was an unusual start. The point of this story was the next morning because Diane called her houseman up to cook a meal. And afterwards she said she'd never seen anyone eat so much because I had a healthy appetite. I just climbed from Mount Meru. And she introduced me to Kelly and to Tim, who was the American traveler who I was replacing. She'd given Tim a lift. He was just hitching across Africa and Dianne Fossey gave him a lift in her VW Kombi minibus and said, have you got any spare time because I'm short-staffed and I could use an extra pair of hands. So Tim took time out from his travels to help and expected to spend a couple of weeks there. And 6 months later, he was itching to get back on the road. And I came and took over from Tim. But anyway, Tim was in one half of a 2-room cabin and I was given the other half. But the point I wanted to make, and this is the important thing, is in the morning when I opened the curtains, I was seeing the forest for the first time. It was all in shadow and dark the night before. And it was like a wonderland. Hypericum trees with little needle-like leaves and beautiful yellow flowers and Hagenia trees, big contorted branches with massive mossy cushions on the branches and leaves like hands. Just magical. And all the branches draped with Usnea, which is a lichen, rather like the reindeer moss, but hanging from the trees, sometimes called Spanish moss. Very pretty scene. And Tim introduced me to the tracker in the Mayé, and off we went to find Group 4. And that involved a long hike through the mountains. This is what I'm going to be doing for the next, I don't know, year or two. So that was wonderful. But my first day in the field, we found not gorilla footprints and muckle prints, but human footprints. A human heel and a gorilla heel is very similar, rounded pad, which leaves a distinct impression. But gorillas, of course, have an opposing big toe. And humans don't. Ours are all in line. And we could see, having picked up the heel print, that the toes were all in line. So this meant poachers. Tim said, well, the rule at camp is if you find signs, fresh poacher signs, you follow them because the poachers are setting snares not intended to catch gorillas, but gorillas are like bycatch. You know, the snares are set for antelope, which they want to eat and for the skins. If a young gorilla gets caught in a snare, it can be maimed, it can lose the hand, or it can die if the infection sets in. So, okay, lesson one. First day in the field in Africa, you find signs of poaching, you follow the trail, you cut the snares, and we followed the trail up to the Afro-Alpine moorland. This is about 11,000, 11,500 feet above sea level. Beautiful scenery. And across moorland, again, quite reminiscent of the Cairngorms. We see some men walking along the edge of the forest, and it's patchy forest up there with weird plants, giant senecios and giant groundsel, which just look unworldly. We saw smoke appearing from the trees, so there's obviously— they'd built a campfire and doing whatever they were doing. Tim said, right, we'll creep up on the camp and attack. There's 3 of us.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 24:30
And did you have weapons?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 24:32
No, no. Well, we were carrying a pangar to cut your way through the forest, but that's a tool rather than a weapon, although obviously they can be used as a weapon. But no, the 2 of us had white skin. And this was so soon after independence that anyone with white skin was perceived as being authority. And they were breaking the law. They were in Africa's first national park. Last year, 2025, was the 100th anniversary of Africa's first national park. Rather sobering to think that I've been involved in that park for half that time. Anyway, the three of us crept up to the forest and looked through the trees and saw the poachers sitting around a campfire. And it turned out that they were waiting for their friends and just built a fire to sit and wait. And I had in my bag a Cornwall Constabulary police whistle. If anyone has heard a police whistle, it's a very characteristic tone. But of course, in Rwanda, no one knows that sound as being, oh, that's a police whistle. Anyway, we gave that to Roel Akana, the tracker, and the three of us ran out of the camp shouting, screaming like it. And the poachers took one look at us and fled, which is good. And we shouted abuse in Kinyarwanda and French and Swahili at them. And picked up their spears and snares and butchered bushbuck, antelope, and left. We didn't want them to notice that there were only 3 of us because there were more of them. And we didn't know that they were waiting for their friends, which would have been an even bigger group. So we went down the mountain and knocked on Dian's door again, carrying spears and a dead bushbuck. And Dian was, I guess, impressed because The fight against poaching was very real. Now, you know, just stepping aside from the story, we had no authority to do that. Tim was an American traveler. I was a new research assistant. Diane was a visiting researcher who had a letter to authorize her being in the park, but not to do anti-poaching patrols. But she was an activist. One of the last interviews she gave before she was murdered, perhaps because of her activism was that, well, she came here to study the gorillas. She could not— she said, I can't close my eyes or my mind to what's going on around me. She saw a problem and thought, I can't just ignore that. And the men who were hired by the government to patrol the park were not at that point well trained, well equipped, well motivated, or well paid. And the park, as I mentioned, is cold, wet, muddy, and full of thistles and nettles and brambles that scratch you. It's not a comfortable place to work unless you're a naturalist who likes that kind of thing. So yes, day 2, Tim takes me out and I meet Group 4. And the first gorilla I met was called Titus. And he was an infant being chased off a tree by his younger brother, Kweli. And they were playing, climbing in a tree. And we were on the outside of a thicket, having done the whole, you know, following the trail, tracking. It's a gorilla print, not a human print. And getting to them, we came to this wall of vegetation and Tim says, right, we're going under that because we could see that the gorillas had— and gorillas are kind of big at the front and narrow at the back. And when they push through, the vegetation just flies off them. Naturalists are covered in straps and bags and binoculars and constantly getting tangled in the vegetation and you crawl out and emerge the other side. And then it was a peaceful scene, like joining a family picnic. You know, the Sulawaks over there, females dotted around, kids playing and everyone's completely relaxed. And that's when I saw my first moment for me and first moment for them to see me. But they knew Tim by now. What people perhaps don't realize is that the gorillas understand the concept of a friend of a friend. So, you know, you go to a party with someone that the host doesn't know and he knows you and he'll assume that if this is your friend, all's going to be well. And the gorillas looked over and saw a new face and kind of angled a little bit and then went back to what they were doing, grooming their friend or preparing food or whatever. And I wasn't the subject of much interest. Because I was with Tim, who had been introduced by Diane. And then later when I went out with Diane, I saw how the gorillas responded to her, which is very different. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So yeah, my job at that point was learning to recognize the individuals. Each gorilla, like the one looking over my shoulder, that's Digit, who was a young silverback in Group 4.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 29:04
Digit was the famous gorilla who was in—
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 29:07
who was killed.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 29:08
Diane was— yeah, Diane was wanting to protect him when Diane was mode. Is that correct?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 29:14
That's how the movie portrayed it. That isn't how it happened.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 29:16
It's a movie.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 29:17
Yes. Digit was a silverback in the movie Gorillas in the Mist, but in real life he was a young silverback, not the leader of the group. And his job as a young silverback was to hang back from the group if they were being pursued by danger and deal with the danger. It's the expendable young males. You know, we send our sons off to fight wars. Any men who have reached old age are then the leaders of the community. Directing the young men to go and fight the enemy. It's kind of like that in gorilla society, the blackback and young silverbacks becoming peripheral. They live on the edge of the group before they go off into the big world and find a female of their own. And Digit was at that stage. He was peripheral to the group. He was having a thing with Simba, a young female in the group. But before he could leave and start a family with Simba or, you know, start an independent life, He was killed by poachers, but that was, you know, 14 months after this occasion. And I was sitting there sketching the faces of the gorillas to get to know the shape of the nostrils and the lines above the nostrils, which form a pattern that we refer to as nose prints. Not that you can make a print of them. The gorillas object if you put some ink on their face and stick a piece of paper on them. But you can sketch the shape. It's like a fingerprint. Each individual is unique.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 30:37
And my job is like whale tails, tails of whales.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 30:40
Yes, the way it identifies. Most animals have some characteristic which allows them and human observers to recognize them. Shepherds who herd sheep know the individual sheep. To anyone else, they just look like a flock of sheep. But the shepherd has got his eye in. And I was getting my eye in to understanding gorilla identity. Because if you're studying their behavior, you have to be able to say who's sitting next to who and who's doing what to whom. So yeah, sketching the nose prints, learning the names. Now, Diane had followed Jane Goodall, who was the first scientist to name her study animals and was roundly criticized by the old-school scientists. No, no, you have to give them numbers. This is a science. You can't give them names and infer personality. Because that's human stuff. And when you're studying other beings, we're human beings, they're gorilla beings or chimpanzee beings in Jane's case, you know that they're individuals if you're open to that. And Jane famously was, she said she had a teacher as a child, which was her dog, Rusty, who she knew was an individual who she could interact with and had a personality. So when she studied chimpanzees, she gave them names and Diane didn't follow Jane's example with provisioning them. Jane, to attract the chimps into camp initially, provided bananas in camp.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 32:02
Yes.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 32:02
You got to watch lots of behavior, but it was all centered around the ever-fruiting banana, not a tree, but a source of bananas. And then she realized that that was changing the behavior and they were fighting over access to the bananas. So she stopped that and Diane never started provisioning the gorillas. And gorillas are herbivores, so their feeding and vegetation is like being a vegetarian in a salad bowl. You just have to reach out your arm and there is food. So which food plants they choose and how they prepare each mouthful is a fascinating study. And so the general notes that I was instructed to take were, what's the group doing? They were resting. What are certain individuals doing? Well, someone's preparing a food item over there. What species is it? Someone's playing with a friend over here. Who's playing with whom. And so getting a picture of gorilla society, that was my job as the research assistant for the long-term records of camp. And when there was a new baby, you noticed it. If somebody died, you noticed it. If, if a female left to join another group or a young male finally went off and started life on his own, then you'd have to follow the lone silverback and see if he interacted with other groups, acquired females and built a new family. So that was the big picture understanding of gorilla society, that we were there to— Interesting.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 33:23
Ian, did you feel safe all the time in terms of safe from the gorillas?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 33:29
Safe from the gorillas, yes, because it had been well established by then that when gorilla silverback charges, it is a bluff charge, and it's one of the most spectacular displays in the animal kingdom. You know, they will ideally try and get up.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 33:45
Terrifying, I imagine.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 33:47
Yes, but these gorillas have been studied for 10 years at that point. Diane started in 1967 and I got there in 1976. So they'd had nearly 10 years of calm humans that they'd come to trust. And the humans adopted gorilla etiquette. So instead of standing up on two legs, we'd be on all fours. And so you're on the same eye level as them. And that changes the psychology of the situation. When a gorilla stands up, it's either to look over the vegetation because they've heard something and they can't see what it is. They're trying to see what's coming. Or to display and beat their chest and make themselves look big and impressive. And Diane learned, and she was very self-conscious about her height. She was a 6-foot-tall woman. She was 36 when she came to Rwanda. And she'd been working as an occupational therapist in a children's hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. And that training of winning the trust of children who are often frightened or traumatized in hospital and getting them to interact in a way that enabled them to learn how to do things was perhaps very helpful when dealing with non-human beings who were frightened of you. So she adopted gorilla mannerisms. I mean, at first they fled from her and she would try and sneak up and peek on them. Then she had the rather unfortunate experience of being told to look after two infant gorillas who had been captured by the authorities to give as a diplomatic gift to Germany. It still sometimes happens that governments in developing countries give a gift of wildlife to to the government of a visiting dignitary, and they take it home and give it to a zoo, and they spend a lifetime in captivity.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 35:34
Diane had that job of nurturing.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 35:36
She was told by the authorities to look after these infants. And this was portrayed in the film, which she hated, but she got to learn because she won the trust of these infants that needed a carer, and she was a very loving person. So she loved these infants as a mother. She learned how to look after them. And they were getting better when they were then taken from her and sent to Germany. And they died a couple of years later.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 36:01
Oh, heartbreaking.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 36:02
In a zoo. Mountain gorillas have never survived in captivity other than in their homeland where they're being fed natural foods. So she learned some of their quiet vocalizations. When they're contented, they will sing softly. They're usually eating when they're happy, and when they're happy, they sing. So, "Wom, wom, wom." And she started using these vocalizations to reassure the gorillas that she was approaching, that she was meaning no harm. And so the gorillas would see it as a human and be alarmed and hear, "Wom, wom, wom." Her pretending to eat the wild celery. And she also noticed that when she climbed a tree to try and get a better view of the gorillas, She wasn't very good at climbing, tall gangly woman. So the gorillas were fascinated, but she saw them looking at her. So she handed up and made it even more difficult. And they were, what on earth is that woman doing? Because gorillas are curious, like all primates, like the other animals, not just primates. If they see something they don't understand, they will keep looking to try and understand. And if they're not afraid, You know, fear is the enemy of curiosity. And if you're scared of what you're trying to study, it gets in the way. And if they are scared of you, it gets in the way because what you're studying is fear behavior. And, you know, I've got shelf fulls of books from the 19th century, early 20th century of people who described gorillas charges. And those descriptions echoed through the literature, both in novels a very popular boyhood book in the late 19th and early 20th century was called The Gorilla Hunters. Almost word for word, the description was the same as Paul Deschaillu, the first European or the first white person— he was an American of French extraction— to see gorillas in the wild. But he was collecting specimens, i.e., shooting them. And when you attack a group of gorillas, particularly gorillas that have only ever seen humans as attackers, they are terrified and will try and leave. And if you keep following them, then the silverback will come and deal with you, or the young silverback if there is an old male and a young male. And the silverback will roar and charge and scream and put on this huge display, but he's not going to tangle with you if you can avoid it. He's hoping to scare you away. But if he does tangle with you, then you might well die. So there's no— gorillas, yes, they're the gentle vegetarians living in the mountains, but If a gorilla swipes at you, his fingernails will disembowel you if he happens to make contact with your abdomen. And I did actually meet one chap who had been a poacher and had alarmed a gorilla who had fought with him and hit him. The nails left parallel tracks across his gut. Another inch, he would have been dead. His guts would have been across the bushes. He would have been dead. But he just had the skin scraped by by a gorilla hand. And I heard the story of a Mbutwa, a pygmy hunter in Kahuziebiega National Park who was killed by the silverback and his family couldn't get the body back because the silverback was so riled up and angry that he stood over it for a day or two. And in the end, the warden of the park actually used an explosive to frighten away the gorilla so the family could bury. So yeah, there's no doubt that gorillas are big, powerful animals. Several times stronger than a human male, even an athlete. But they don't use that power unless they're threatened.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 39:34
You were never threatened?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 39:35
Well, I was threatened by gorillas. I was charged by unhabituated gorillas who thought I was a threat. And I was shouted at occasionally by semi-habituated gorillas who misunderstood the situation. But yeah, they're impressive animals. But now, as anyone will know if you've picked up a travel magazine, visiting the gorillas is one of the bucket list experiences that there is in the world. And I urge anyone who can afford it to get a ticket to Rwanda or to Uganda or to the Congo when it settles down. Congo sadly is off the travel list because your travel insurance doesn't cover you if you go into a hostile territory. But if you do go to the Congo in Eastern DRC, you will find rangers who are as friendly and welcoming as they are in Rwanda and Uganda. You'll find gorillas who are as habituated and you'll have a similarly wonderful experience, but you just have to go there at your own risk because your travel insurance won't cover you unless you take out the kind of insurance that war correspondents take out to go into an area of unrest. Anyway, this was 1976. I was introduced to the whole karisoke work routine and every week it seemed there was a fringe group coming in interacting with the study groups that needed special study or there was a poaching incident and traps were found, we had to cut snares or— it was a very dramatic time. And during that time, I learned to type because you took notes with a pencil and a notebook. Pencil because it works in the rain and it rains a lot. Now, of course, people studying gorillas have got a tablet and they're putting their data in and there's an app analyzing the data as they collect it. Whereas then it was, you write it in your notebook You type it up that evening and later you collect the data to write an article or a paper. So things have changed in the intervening 50 years. It makes it much easier for researchers. Yes. And Karisoke is no longer in the park. The research center is now a big new building built through a gift from Ellen DeGeneres, the TV host, and her wife, who gave the money to build a research center in Rwanda. To Ellen because she loves gorillas and she's been several times and helped raise money for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, which continues Dian's research work and works with the communities on conservation. And the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund changed. Dian set up the Digit Fund, and on the last day of 1977, Digit was speared by poachers playing the role of the young male defending his family. The poachers, it turned out when we captured one of them later and interrogated him, had been given a standing order from a trader in town. He said, I'll give you $20 if you bring me a gorilla head and hands. And he'd found that foreigners would buy a gorilla skull. And there was a traditional use of hands for magic, for sort of magic pouches. And some cultures in Africa believe that gorillas have medicinal properties. They're such a big powerful animals that if you somehow ingest or use some of their body, then you get some of that strength. And that's a belief. And when you believe something, you know, you ask your doctor what to do and he says, oh, go and buy a bit of gorilla finger in the market. That creates a demand for gorilla hands. But in Rwanda, people don't eat gorilla meat. There's no culture of eating apes. So gorillas and chimpanzees have less dangerous human neighbors, but sometimes they're dangerous because if the old traditional medicine man wants a gorilla hand, he'll send a hunter off to get one. And so being killed by a human was not unknown to the gorillas, but it didn't happen all the time. Whereas further west in Africa, in Congo Gabon, Cameroon, the human cultures there regard gorilla meat as very special. It's big man's meat. If you're the chief and you're hosting neighboring chiefs for a meeting and you don't serve them gorilla, you're disrespecting them. And if that's your culture, that's, you know, if I'd grown up in a village like that, that's what I would think was normal. So we're all cultural animals and we learn the rules of our society. And if that is you kill a gorilla for big special occasions, that's what you do. And that's what we're fighting against still. Today in some parts of Africa. But happily in Rwanda and Uganda, people don't eat ape meat. And those gorillas are now the basis of a very successful tourism business. Many businesses, hotels and travel companies and chauffeurs and musicians.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 44:08
That's good to hear good news.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 44:10
It is one of the good news stories in conservation that over the past 50 years it's gone from there's only 250 gorillas in the Virungas and we don't know how many are in Bwindi because no one's counted them, And now there's more than 1,000 gorillas, mountain gorillas, probably 1 or 200,000 western lowland gorillas. But again, hard to count, unhabituated, still threatened by hunting. But for mountain gorillas, they've gone from likely extinction. Dian feared they would be extinct in the same century that they were described by science. You know, it was in 1847 that Paul Deschailloux shot and described the Western Lowland Gorillas. And that was because he'd grown up in a mission station in Gabon and spent his teenage years with the local tribespeople. He knew their languages. And so as an adult, when he went back to Gabon, he could travel much more successfully than anybody else because he spoke the language. He was trusted by local chiefs. And it was at his father's mission station that a visiting American missionary had picked up a skull and realized that it was an undescribed species and took it to Harvard, where an anatomist, Jeffreys Wyman, described it. And the missionary's name was Thomas Savage. So every time you see a formal description of gorilla, it is gorilla gorilla brackets Savage and Wyman. So the word savage is forever attached gorilla because of that rule of nomenclature that you formally describe it and your name becomes part of the species description. Anyway, it wasn't until 1902 that the mountain gorilla was described. And we've been talking for a long time about gorillas, but I could talk till the cows— till the world—
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 45:54
I know. Oh my gosh, there's so, so much, so many amazing experiences you've had. How did you feel when you you heard the news of Diane's murder? How did that affect you?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 46:07
I was in England at my in-laws for Christmas, and Diane was found early in the morning of the 27th of December. And the irony is she'd actually delayed Christmas celebration at camp because she was expecting a producer from Universal Studios who was coming, who was interested in making a movie based on her book Gorillas in the Mist, and he landed in Kigali with his team only to learn the person he was coming to see had just been murdered. That's why the movie begins with, or ends with, the death of Dian Fossey. Yeah, so I was in England. I got a phone call from Sandy Harcourt, who was then in America, that he'd heard that Dian had been murdered. She was an American citizen. I guess they'd reached out to people they knew who had worked with her. I didn't go out to camp until a few days later, just after her funeral. She was buried at Karisoke on the last day of 1985, and I was out there in early January '86 because I'd been asked by the Digit Fund, as it then was, later changed its name to the Diane Fossey Grill. And Diane wouldn't have wanted that. She didn't want her name in lights. She wanted Digit's name in lights. And that's why this portrait by an English artist called Frank Lomas looks over my shoulder in the way that Digit used to do when I was taking notes. So it amuses me that Digit's still keeping an eye on me. But yeah, 10 years to the day after Digit's death, Diane was buried. Did it shock you, Ian? Of course it shocked you. Digit's death was a shock because Digit, by that time, after knowing him for 14 months, was a friend. He would choose to come and sit next to me. It's a free forest, he could have been anywhere, and he chose to spend his rest period sitting next to his human friend. And you got that sense with certain individuals, you know, first they're just curious because they're new, and then they ignore you. And then after a few weeks or months, it seems like they actually quite enjoy some individuals. Not everyone, not the mature silverback. He's got responsibilities looking after the females and the kids. But the younger ones, you're part of their world and they've accepted you. So Digit's death—
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 48:30
Do you feel a friend?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 48:32
I thought of him as a friend.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 48:33
Digit's friend.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 48:34
And when a friend is murdered, of course it is awful. And when I had to tell Diane, that was the second worst thing that ever happened to me because She'd known Džit from infancy and he was more than a friend. And it was like watching a shutter go down behind her eyes as she closed off that grief. At that moment, Diane's first thought was for the rest of the group. I hadn't even thought about that. She said, is everyone else safe? So my instruction then was follow the group, find out if anyone else was injured in the attack. Fortunately, nobody was, but the group fleeing from the poachers had run into Nunky's group. A rival silverback. So out of the frying pan into the fire, and no young male to deal with the opposition. So it was a turbulent time, and it was a few days after that that the BBC arrived to film with David Attenborough for Life on Earth. So from the depths of despair and grief to one of the highlights of mine and of David's life. You know, he's still with us, just coming up to 100. And he still says that meeting the gorillas was one of the milestone moments in his amazing career.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 49:42
That feel for you, actually introducing David Attenborough to gorillas.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 49:47
That's amazing. I was a gofer. I was told to go for the BBC and then take them out to Group 4 initially and then to Group 5. And, you know, they were here for about a week here at Karisoke. And David Attenborough was sort of famous, but not as famous as he became. He wasn't a knight then, he was just David Attenborough. He became Sir David Attenborough later, and he's just got a second knighthood at the age of 99. His career went on and on, but that was his first big natural history series that he had conceived of. Before that, he'd done the Zoo Quest series where he traveled literally to collect animals for London Zoo. So that doesn't sit well with current thinking, but that was what you did in the '50s and '60s. So he then was promoted to be the controller of BBC2. It was under his leadership that BBC2 introduced colour television, and he knew that that was going to transform two areas of sport, because you can see the colours of teams, and snooker, because you can see the colours of the balls, and natural history, because you can see the colours of nature. And he'd been a naturalist from Hollywood. So he stepped down from that leadership position to make Life on Earth, the first of the Life series, and what followed, you know, Life of Mammals, Life of Birds, Life of Plants. And I said to him as we walked back from the gorillas the first day with the film crew, there can't be many natural history greats that you haven't seen. Last week I was swimming with manta ray off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and next week I'm going to Gombe to film chimpanzees with Jane Goodall. That is, I still haven't swum with a manta ray. I still haven't been to Gombe, and sadly Jane's no longer with us. So I think he has probably seen more natural history than any human who's ever lived.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 51:36
And what was he like to work with, Ian? What was David like to work with?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 51:40
He's, you know, has the same sort of cultural background as me, and I've been living on the mountain with Africans who communicate with very bad Swahili, as I learned it, who became great friends, lifelong friends. You know, you work together It's like being in the army together. You have friends for life because you've done important things together in a difficult situation. And Diane, who, you know, much as I get on very well with Americans, they have a different sense of humor, a different cultural background. And suddenly to be surrounded by four Englishmen with the same sense of humor that was shaped by the Goons, by Monty Python, by all the comedy radio and television that we grew up with. It was fun. And David Attenborough is a brilliant raconteur. I mean, you can tell it from the way he reads the scripts, most of which he's written, or certainly tweets, even if someone else has done the research. He is knowledgeable and good fun to be around. And now he's sort of everyone's favorite uncle as he approached his 100th birthday. But I digress. Just after Digit was killed, David came and he promised Diane that when he went back to the UK, he would help raise funds to protect the gorillas. And he contacted the Fauna Preservation Society, as it then was, now known as Fauna and Flora International. And they got together with WWF and the People's Trust for Endangered Species and the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, set up a mountain gorilla project which introduced the tourism, which Diane was not terribly happy about because at that point tourism was a very destructive force. Disturbing the gorillas. But Bill Webber and Amy Vedder, who had learned at Karisoke under Diane and my teaching of how to interact with the gorillas and approach them for research purposes, they applied those methods to habituate gorillas for tourism. And that's why you and anyone else who's listening or watching this can go on holiday to Africa and visit gorillas and not have screaming charges. Just see, as I did on that first day, join a family picnic, but you have to keep 3 meters away. You can't do a David Attenborough and have kids climb on you. No one expected that to happen, but he was with me or with Diane, and the gorillas understand, oh, they're your friends, are they? That's fine. The kids can play with you. We don't mind. So that's a level of trust that adults would let their children play near the humans because they trusted the humans and vice versa. And that's what David Attenborough showed in Life on Earth, which wasn't the intention. That was just an accidental happy event. And the cameraman— yes, yes— who was shooting film— of course, this is 16mm film. He's got a limited number of rolls of film to achieve what they're on safari to get. So it's not like today when you can just keep filming and it just goes on the hard drive and you've got another card in. Then if you had 100 foot of film in the cam, then you had to change the film. So, but with Pavlo, the juvenile, and Poppy playing with David Attenborough, Pavlo sitting on him, Poppy undoing his shoelaces, the producer John Sparks said to the cameraman Martin Saunders, 'Oh, just get a bit of this. It'll be fun for the guys in the cutting room,' never expecting it to make it into the program. But in the end, it was considered, you know, many people thought it was fake. They thought, 'Oh, it's somehow computer-generated— there weren't computer-generated images there, but they thought it somehow had been faked. But it wasn't. And that told people that actually, yes, gorillas, if they trust you, will accept you into their midst. And I think that happened just before the gorilla tourism started, really influenced people. Oh, we can go and do what David Attenborough did and sit near the gorillas and take our— it was before the days of selfies. I have no selfie of me with David Attenborough and the gorillas because we didn't do that then. We didn't have cameras, you could hold out and take your own photographs. Anyway, Diane's death was obviously a terrible shock for all concerned, but the people that she had inspired, either because they wanted to emulate her dedication and passion, or because they thought she was doing it all wrong and they could make a better job of it, there were both camps. Some people thought Diane was completely going up the wrong tree with her. She was controversial at the time and still remains so. And some of the things written about her were just plain wrong. And some of them had a kernel of truth. She did have a foul temper. I describe her as having a short fuse and a rich vocabulary. So when she saw that you've been doing something in her eyes wrong, she would let you know and go from a sort of crinkly-eyed friendly face to anger. And when it came to poachers, to to hatred. I'd never seen that kind of hatred. But these were people who were not only killing the antelope, sometimes they were killing her friends. So yeah, that was the world that I lived in for a couple of years in the late '70s and again in the early '80s doing census work. And I take people back, have film crews or special interest tours almost every year because it, it is wonderful to keep an involvement with that. And I'm chairman of the organization which is what the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund UK or Europe changed its name to when it was just too confusing having a UK organization and an American organization. So they're both descendants of Dian Fossey's work, as indeed are the gorilla doctors, because Dian asked for veterinary help at a big conference in America, and that led the Morris Animal Foundation to set up the Latin Gorilla Veterinary Project, which evolved into The Gorilla Doctors that you can find online and read about the daily checking on the health of mountain gorillas and eastern lowland gorillas. So Diane triggered, either by requesting or by example or by someone wanting to be able to do different things to achieve the same goal, the protection of the gorillas. And now every year there are more mountain gorillas than there were the year before, which is, you know, fantastic.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 57:39
Wonderful legacy.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 57:40
Wow. It is.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 57:42
Before we finish, Ian, can you please touch on your experience with elephants? Because I understand you have some amazing experiences with cave-dwelling elephants.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 57:51
Yes, well, cave-dwelling, cave-visiting. When I got to Karisoke in '76, the last of the elephants that lived around, and often Diane said they would come and scratch their bottom on the cabin and the whole cabin would shake, had been killed by poachers. I saw the remains. I've got the kneecap from that last elephant. They're interested in comparative anatomy. So seeing elephants on the way to the gorillas was a rare treat. Sometimes happened. And these were forest elephants, although the area where the Virungas, the Virunga volcanoes are, is in a hybrid zone. So some of them are hybrid between savanna elephants and forest elephants, but they live in the forest. And the ones that we were seeing had downwards pointing tusks. And round ears. In '79, I went on an expedition to New Guinea called Operation Drake, and it was a round-the-world voyage of a brigantine called the Eye of the Wind. Wherever the ship called in— this was 400 years after Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation, so that's why it's called Operation Drake— and it was organized by a chap called John Blashford Snell, who was in the Royal Engineers and was a sort of a pith helmet-wearing explorer of the old school. He's still with us and still organizing trips in his 80s. But John conceived of using the energy of youth and why young explorers could join the expedition and have the guidance of scientists and use military logistics. So we had the British Army and other armies helping set up the expedition infrastructure. And after New Guinea, the either wind sailed across the Indian Ocean to Kenya. And various mini expeditions happened around Kenya. And so in 1980, I was on my way back from Rwanda, having done some gorilla work with the Mountain Gorilla Project. And bumped into my friends from Operation Drake in Nairobi. And while I was chatting to them, a reconnaissance party came in talking about cave elephants or elephant caves. And the words cave and elephant are seldom in the same sentence in my experience at that point. And I said, elephant cave, what would it be? And it turns out that on Mount Elgon, which is an extinct volcano on the border of Kenya and Uganda, there are caves. And these caves are visited by elephants and other species. And the Kenyan Wildlife Authority at the time had asked Operation Drake to build a path up to the cave so that the visitors to the cave, the tourists, weren't on the same path as the elephants for obvious reasons. Walking into a cave and elephants coming out of the cave or vice versa could be disastrous. So that was where my path building experience in Cairngorms came in very handy. I joined that team and we built a path up to the cave. And that path stood for decades until recently. The Kenyan authorities put in the concrete steps, which I hate, but I'm sure they're now weathered down and covered in moss and don't look so bad as they did when they first built them. But we built wooden and stone steps like in the Kenkoms, more natural and fitting in. And I experienced elephants underground for the first time. And elephants communicate using low-frequency rumbles below the range of hearing of the human ear. So we just hear the upper harmonics. And it sounds a bit like, to our ear. In fact, there's a low-frequency vibration you feel with your body. If you're close enough, or if you're in a cave. So if you've ever been in a cave when an elephant is rumbling, it is extraordinary. And once I'd experienced that and then discovered, you know, Kenya is a country with natural history filmmakers and scientists studying, and no one had studied elephants underground. What? So yes, that became my big study. I still maintained an involvement with gorillas from a conservation point of view, fundraising and lecturing about gorillas and their importance. And for a time, studying the elephants was just me being a naturalist, satisfying my curiosity because elephants are amazing. And these elephants eventually learned to trust me in the cave with them. At that point, I hadn't started using that rumble, but I reasoned when I wanted to habituate them that just as Diane won the confidence of the gorillas by saying, mm-hmm, which means you'll hear it on fire or singing. The elephant equivalent might be— So it doesn't fool them. They don't think, oh, is that an elephant over there? But it's a kind of friendly sound. It says there's a human there. And if that happens a few times and the human doesn't attack, then they associate that sound with friendly humans. Now, obviously, you can't do that if they're still at risk from poachers. Diane didn't want to habituate the gorillas to anyone until they were safe. Otherwise, you turn around to see who it is, thunk, there's a spear in the chest or a bullet. Yes, yes. Diane didn't habituate the gorillas to the African staff at camp, and she was accused of being racist. But she was only racist in the sense that the gorillas didn't— they associated black faces with poachers. Yes. And until they were secure, you can't take away that fear response. Likewise with elephants, if you do something that no poacher ever does, poachers try and sneak up on an elephant and not be detected. But if you say, I am here and I'm harmless, with the sound that they associate with calm, quiet life, then we learned very quickly once we did start using that method many years later, that they responded and you could tell them that you were there and they would stop giving fear responses. So that's exciting.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:03:59
Could you describe a highlight of your work with elephants?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:04:04
Well, the highlight was eventually following them into the cave once they'd got used to my presence and it wasn't going to frighten them because it's dark in there and there are pitfalls that calves could fall into. Crevasses. You don't want to panic the elephants in the cave. But once they'd accepted me, I followed them in and I watched elephants deep underground. Everything I saw them doing was the first time anyone had seen an elephant doing that underground. So the articles I wrote in those early days were full of first observations, which as a biologist is obviously exciting. So that was mind-boggling. And the caves are also inhabited by people, sometimes seasonally. And when people were living in the caves, they didn't go in the back because it was scary. So one of my oldest friends on Mount Elgon is David Kipareng'ei, who was born in Kitum Cave, the cave that I most studied. Although there are dozens of caves, so far we're up to 55. I say we, the Mount Elgon Foundation now is continuing that work with Kenyan scientists and rangers. And it's fantastic what they're doing. They just put another collar on one of the elephants to follow it. Follow their movements. So we're learning more about the Elgon elephants today than I ever managed when I was studying them. I was just tracking them on foot. But yeah, winning the trust— and this is the highlights of both my gorilla work and my elephant work and any other species that I encounter in their natural habitat— is when they accept me as a harmless observer. And then perhaps beyond that, oh, it's an interesting part of their environment. And then you have mutual curiosity. And if your research is based on mutual curiosity, rather than the human overcoming the fear of his or her study animal, then you get very different results. But you also form a relationship. I think interspecies friendships are entirely possible once those animals trust you. And as I said earlier, fear is the enemy of curiosity. If they're not afraid, then they're curious. What are you? What? You know, so animals that come up and investigate you. Because they're not afraid, but they're thinking, this is a very strange creature, very different from me. Or in the case of gorillas, very similar to me. You know, gorillas will pull down your lip and look at your teeth and examine your anatomy with the curiosity of a naturalist. But that has to be with complete trust. And now, of course, we don't allow that because of the risk of people bringing contagious diseases in. So now the visitors to the gorillas and the scientists, they wear masks so there's no droplet infection of viruses or bacteria, and you keep a 10-meter distance unless you're one of the gorilla doctors intervening to remove a snare, which sadly are still set by some people, not many, there are still a few diehard poachers that haven't yet given up the habit. So with the elephants, it was the winning their trust, and there was one night when they were in the cave and I thought, I'm not going to follow them in tonight, I'm just going to wait and see how long they spend end of their volition in the cave. And sitting in the cave mouth, it's cold. This is— and the Kitum Cave is just under 8,000 feet above sea level, so not quite as high as Karisoke in the Virungas, but still at night, montane rainforest, bitterly cold. And I'm sitting there shivering, so I get into my sleeping bag and I'm curled up just at the mouth of the cave, right where the elephant path is. And I suddenly wake up, there's an elephant right there. I could have reached out my arm, he could have reached out his trunk. And I took his photograph, which is perhaps unwise, but he didn't react aggressively, he left. And there was one occasion in a side chamber where a young male elephant who I nicknamed Charles because he turned around and stuck his ears out, and I have this photograph of his sticking outside, so of course he had to be called Charles. Sorry, Ioannis. And Charles reacted to me trying to photograph him deep underground by sticking out his ears and saying, back off, which I did. But then he went back to tusking. So, OK, I was annoying him slightly, but he wasn't afraid of me and he carried on doing what he wanted to do. And any ethologist who studies animal behavior wants to study an animal that is behaving as if they weren't there. You want to see their natural behavior. Not observer-orientated behavior, either fear or curiosity. Now, the curiosity is interesting. And so winning that trust is fantastic. I once had a 6-minute conversation with a completely wild elephant on Mount Elgon. And you can find it on my YouTube channel. And the Dodo did a thing about it because I was rumbling to the elephant to tell him I was there. He turned around and stuck his ears out. Just normal elephant thing to do. And he stood tall and came forward and I, I'm filming this and for the first time one of the trackers had a camera behind me. And so he filmed me filming the elephants. So we've got both viewpoints and that interaction, which I call a conversation, went on for 6 minutes. Usually an elephant sees a human and runs away. And because I'd spoke to the elephant and the elephant was curious, curious. You had two beings, very different anatomy, his brain perhaps four times the size of my brain. Who knows what elephants are capable of in their thinking? But he was curious rather than afraid, a bit nervous. And I reassured him, he came forward, I backed off a little bit. So we spoke to each other in my body language, his body language. And eventually he went back to feeding. Which he'd been doing before I interrupted him. And that to me is sort of the, the success of an encounter with a wild animal. Doesn't run away, maybe shows a bit of curiosity, then goes back to doing whatever he or she was doing. And you can observe or film or take photographs and then share that experience with the world, which is why I'm very happy you invited me to share some of these experiences. And against those high spots, of course, are the low spots where you're standing beside the body of someone you knew. First with Digit, then 10 years later in '87, I stood beside the body of Charles. I think it was Charles. He had his face sliced off with a chainsaw because his front teeth were worth money. And so since Digit and Charles, I've spent most of my time trying to dissuade people from buying bits of dead wild animals. Yeah, working in policy to improve the protection of UN conventions. Next week I'm going to the UN Convention on Migratory Species representing the Born Free Foundation that I work with closely on lots of these issues, trying to improve international law to protect animals that travel across these artificial borders that we call countries. And if neighboring countries share a population or opposite ends of the world, you know, you've got birds in Australia that spend part of the year in Siberia, in the north, and they fly back and forth. And so those flyways need to have coordinated conservation along them if those species can continue to play the role they play in the ecosystems at either end of the migration route. And whether it's whales and dolphins in the, in the sea or sharks or rays, they're migratory species that need coordinated conservation. So next week Brazil is hosting the CMS COP15. Every UN convention has its COP series, a Conference of the Parties. People hear a lot about the climate talks because they're up to COP30. The Convention on Migratory Species is up to the 15th Conference of the Parties, and decisions will be taken by delegates that will improve or not the conservation of species. And our job as NGO observers is to provide information to delegates who might not have a background in biology but are charged by the government of taking an informed decision. And that's what I spend a lot of my time doing and educating people. And I should just mention Ecoflix. I think I touched on it in the beginning. Ecoflix is, is a new TV channel like Netflix, but much smaller, but dedicated to charity in North America and in England. Dedicated to animals and the planet. And yeah, you can learn about the importance of these species in the maintenance of the planet's life support systems. And that's a take-home message from this long rambling conversation about my experiences in nature.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:12:32
You keep answering what I'm about to ask anyway, so it's good.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:12:34
Okay, well, yes, because what I hope listeners and viewers of this conversation will take home is that, of course, these animals are wonderful. And if you're fortunate enough to interact with them, whether it's a woodlouse on your carpet or whatever native species you have living in your garden or in your local park, if you haven't got a garden, you know, you can interact with nature and it lifts your spirits. It's part of what makes us human.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:12:57
Yes.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:12:58
But it's also what keeps us alive as humans, because the forests and the phytoplankton in the oceans provide the oxygen we breathe. The forests and the oceans put the water vapor in the air that falls as rain that waters our crops and feeds us and fills the aquifers to deliver fresh drinking water and powers our hydroelectric, you know, renewable energy schemes. Those won't work if there isn't rain falling from the sky. And the role of forests in doing that is underrepresented in international discussions. So we need to remedy that. We need to inform people that forests aren't just ornaments and animals that live in forests aren't just ornaments. They're part of the forest. They disperse the seeds, they prune the trees, they fertilize the soils, which keeps our planet healthy so that we can all live. And we destroy that at our peril.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:13:45
Yes. So Ian, what can we do as individuals to help wildlife and to help the ecosystems that wildlife live in?
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:13:53
Well, get involved. Talk about the 3 Ps. The power of your pocket or purse, because when you buy something, are you paying for someone to cut down a tree on the other side of the world? So make sure you buy FSC timber or paper, Forest Stewardship Council, and you know it's come from a sustainable source. If you're buying something including palm oil, it has to be from sustainable sources, not recent deforestation. Every oil palm plantation is growing where once there was a forest, but some companies are still cutting down new forests to grow more palm oil because oil palms are the most productive crop that produces vegetable oils. And you stop growing palm oil, you have to actually clear more land to grow other oils because you don't get so much oil per hectare or per acre of other crops.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:14:40
So, and it's often very difficult to know which foods actually contain palm oil because of the labeling, often hidden in vegetable oil.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:14:50
There are organizations that will help you with that. And now everyone's got a bloody computer in their hand with a mobile phone. There are apps that can guide you to, and you can send a message on social media to the company whose product you're about to buy and say, well, I was going to buy your product, but I can't see that it's RSPO's Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil certified. So I'm putting it back on the shelf. Well, if you're the CEO of a company and you keep seeing that in your company's feed, you're going to start shopping more carefully. So the power of your purse is really important. Your political power, even if you're not old enough to vote, your parents are, and you will be in a few years. So politicians care about what you think. They're paid, your elected representatives are paid to represent you. And if you haven't told them what you think, how can they represent those views? So write to politicians. Their job is to answer those letters. And when you write to them, don't just ask them their opinion. Say, can you ask the minister concerned with whatever the issue is? And then they are legally obligated, certainly in the UK and I'm sure in Australia, their job is to ask the minister on your behalf if they represent you. So use the power of your purse, the power of your political persuasion. And the third P, of course, is your personal power. If you've got any spare money left at the end of the month, and if you've got leisure time, sign up to Ecoflix. It's now free to sign up. It used to be a subscription service and we gave all the money to charity. Now it's free. But you can still, you know, we've got about 70-odd partner NGOs around the world and we channel money to them and we also highlight their work. So the documentaries on Ecoflix don't just tell you about a problem, they tell you about who is working to solve that problem. We hope that will inspire young people to get involved as I did as a kid volunteering in nature reserves, getting to know the natural world personally and then sharing that with other people. Because that sharing personal experience grabs people's attention and then makes them think, well, yeah, there's, there's a bit of woodland or a bit of marshland or a bit of coast near me where I could go and pick up the plastic and put it in the recycling bin or the cans and just clean up your patch. And that can really help because those materials go into recycling and actually reduce the amount of raw materials that are needed and your patch is suddenly cleaner and you'll benefit because there are fewer microplastics getting into your food. If you forage for wild plants, you don't want to be ingesting pollutants. So yeah, and then, then get involved. There's a— I live in Stroud in the UK and Stroud is a small town, but it's where Stop Ecocide began. It's a campaign to make ecocide crime under the Rome Statutes, International Criminal Court. And it's where Extinction Rebellion started. That spread around the world because it's a place where people stand up and speak. And I'm proud to be in Stroud. But even if you don't live in Stroud, you can harangue your local councillor, parish councillor, or politician saying, you know, we, the people who live here, care about these issues. But if nobody speaks up, then it's like nobody cares. And they all do. They probably tut when they walk past rubbish. But if you walk past a piece of rubbish, you're almost as bad as the person who chucked it there because you don't put it in a recycling bin. Anyway, yeah, I don't need to be telling people what to do, but I do encourage people to get involved and you'll feel better for it. Your habitat will look better for it.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:18:21
Take action. Take action instead of—
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:18:23
Yes.
Natalie Stockdale (Host) · 1:18:24
Living in despair, take action to solve the problem. Ian, thank you very much for your time. It really has been a great privilege hearing your experiences from the drains that you played in in childhood and the reindeer and the amazing gorillas and elephants. It's been absolutely fascinating and an absolute privilege. Thank you very much.
Ian Redmond (Guest) · 1:18:42
It's been a pleasure to reminisce. I hope it's of interest to your viewers and listeners. Animals and Us is a production of Kintsugi Heroes. Thank you to Xavier Rudd for his permission to use Follow the Sun as our theme music for this series. If you enjoyed this conversation, share the podcast with a friend and let us know by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to support Kintsugi Heroes and the stories we share, head to kintsugiheroes.com.au and follow the instructions to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
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