The pioneering field biologist George B. Schaller was born into an era at odds with his life’s work. By the time he reached places like Brazil, India, and the Himalayas, ecological destruction was well underway and wildlife was steeply in decline.
Yet in many ways, Schaller, who was born in 1933, was years ahead of his time, especially in the way he thought about animals. While most other 20th-century scientists chose to view non-human species as devoid of feeling or complexity, Schaller was convinced that animals possessed inner lives much like our own and had all the hallmarks of consciousness, including personalities, friendships, rivalries, and aspirations. He believed the surest path to discovering these hidden worlds was to meet animals on their own terms, through weeks, months or even years spent living beside them in the field.
BOOK REVIEW — “Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller,” by Miriam Horn (Penguin Press, 640 pages).
The approach paid off. Schaller’s research laid the groundwork for the field of conservation biology, and his commitment to translating his findings into real-world action likely saved numerous species from extinction — earning him acclaim from the likes of David Attenborough and Michael Crichton as the most important animal researcher in the 20th century. In “Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller,” author and filmmaker Miriam Horn documents the triumphs, tragedies, frustrations, and monotonies behind these achievements.
At more than 600 pages, Horn’s impressively researched book draws from decades of letters, diaries, photos, and some 20,000 pages of field notes that the biologist has made during his long career. She also spoke with more than four dozen sources in 16 countries who have worked with Schaller in some capacity, a few as far back as the 1960s. She also extensively interviewed Schaller and his family, and even took two field trips with him.
That the new biography exists at all is a testament to Schaller’s decision that Horn was the right person for the job. He had previously turned down “many biographers,” Horn writes, but he saw in her a kindred spirit who shared “a call to these other beings.” Horn is not only an acclaimed environmental journalist, but spent time working in conservation herself for the U.S. Forest Service and Environmental Defense Fund.
Across his career, Schaller focused on a roving cast of species that, at the time, inhabited “the unprotected and unstudied expanses where most life on Earth remained,” Horn writes. While well-known charismatic species most often preoccupied him — at various points he researched lions, tigers, jaguars, snow leopards, and several types of bears — he also embraced lesser celebrated wildlife. On the Tibetan plateau, for example, he fell hard for pika, a relative of rabbits that “said hello by touching noses, sometimes boxed with their forepaws, and reciprocated his attentions,” Horn writes. He also had a special fondness for wild pigs. In Tanzania, he kept a pet warthog named Giri who “pattered” behind him like a dog and would flop across his body for belly rubs.
Horn’s impressively researched book draws from decades of letters, diaries, photos, and some 20,000 pages of field notes that the biologist has made during his long career.
Schaller often described himself not as a scientist, but as “a biographer of animals.” Horn writes that he had a level of unparalleled insight into other species, including an “unwavering attention few can sustain.” He quickly became known, too, for sheer grit. In three years in the Serengeti, for example, he crisscrossed 93,000 miles and logged 2,900 hours of observations.
In many cases, Schaller generated the first in-depth information on the species he studied. To other scientists’ surprise, he proved that gorillas could be habituated to human presence, and that those great apes are gentle by nature. He proved that tigers were disappearing from India not because of overhunting but because their prey species were in decline, and that lions are cooperative and capable of theory of mind. Across continents, he showed that predators are in fact good for maintaining healthy prey populations. His photographs of snow leopards and pandas — introduced to the world by National Geographic — were the first ever taken of the species in the wild.
For all the beauty he documented, Schaller also had to contend with excruciating loss. In just four years, he watched the snow leopard population in Pakistan dwindle from relatively secure to seriously threatened. His work with jaguars in Brazil came to a heartbreaking end after a rancher he was working with betrayed the team by ordering a mother jaguar to be killed, and announced a decision to clear more forest to expand his cattle herd. In China, Schaller witnessed panda numbers plummeting as the animals lost habitat to logging and agriculture and were grossly mistreated by government staff at a research center. At times, he wondered whether “his intimate way of studying animals” was obsolete “in a mostly emptied world,” Horn writes.
Schaller’s perfectionism and obsessive focus often put him at odds with those he spent time with in the field. He could be irascible and withdrawn — traits Horn traces back to Schaller’s traumatic and isolating childhood, including fleeing Germany in the wake of World War II with his mother, while his father, a former Nazi diplomat, stayed behind.
Horn also does not shy away from describing the strain that Schaller’s scientific efforts put on his family, especially his wife, Kay, who died in 2023. The couple met while studying at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and married in 1957 with the joint goal of a shared lifetime of adventure. In the best of times, they were stationed together. In China, for example, Schaller spent his days crawling through dense thickets of bamboo in search of pandas while Kay stayed back at camp drying and sorting the animals’ feces.
But Kay’s duties in raising their two sons — and later, a growing list of health problems — increasingly kept her from the field. Back in the United States, she remained indispensable to her husband managing his correspondences, editing and typing the manuscripts for his many scientific papers and nearly two dozen popular books and, most importantly, serving as “my emotional center,” as Schaller wrote. Over the years, though, resentment at being left behind grew. “How ironic to marry someone whose dreams seem to match so well with your own and then see them carry him away,” Kay wrote in a private essay in 1997. “I rue it and feel it was not that worthwhile if it ended by separating the family.”
Schaller spent much of the last 40 years of his professional career working in Tibet, where he was the first Westerner allowed to penetrate the highest and wildest parts of the plateau. Documented across 100 pages, the more tedious pace of this section mirrors the slowdown of Schaller’s own achievements as the world changed around him and his aging body began to betray him. Other irritations mounted, too, and detracted from his ability to generate new data: He was often barred from taking photographs, had to pay handlers or police exorbitant sums, and was unable to set his own schedule in the field. “I’m hanging on to something, without the new scientific or conservation achievements to justify the absence from Kay,” he wrote at one point in his 70s.
Across his career, Schaller focused on a roving cast of species that, at the time, inhabited “the unprotected and unstudied expanses where most life on Earth remained,” Horn writes.
Like a species doomed to extinction, Horn describes Schaller as an “endling”— the last of his kind. For wildlife biologists today, regimented schedules and technology-driven approaches to data collection have replaced the extreme, months-long observatory fieldwork Schaller pioneered, and many of the ecosystems and wildlife populations that he studied no longer exist.
Yet even when discouraging, his work ultimately had tangible results. His findings on pandas, for example, led the Chinese government to allocate millions of dollars to the species’ conservation and ban capture of wild pandas for research and entertainment at zoos. After Schaller revealed to the world that luxury shahtoosh shawls, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, were made from the fur of poached Tibetan antelopes, the industry drastically declined. He also helped to inspire the creation of several protected areas, including the Chang Tang reserve in Tibet — the second-largest protected terrestrial area in the world, Horn writes.
Schaller’s reach also extends beyond his individual studies. He blazed a trail for other notable fieldwork, including Dian Fossey’s research with mountain gorillas, Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees, Ullas Karanth’s ground-breaking studies on tigers, and Alan Rabinowitz’s global conservation work with wild cats. Some of his “scientific grandchildren,” as one Chinese colleague called Schaller’s protégés, continue to make major contributions to conservation today.
Perhaps most important of all, though, is the mark he left on the way many people, scientist and civilian alike, view wildlife. As Horn writes, “Beyond all else, Schaller’s work will ever remain a reminder that we live in a world of kin.”