Author of Into Africa: Craig Packer.
University of Chicago Press, 1994

Review by Mel Sunquist and Fiona Sunquist

"Craig Packer is engrossed by the social evolution of animals. Together with his wife, Anne Pusey, he has spent parts of the past 20 or so years working in Africa, watching baboons, chimpanzees and lions in an effort "to solve fundamental problems about how cooperation can arise in a sea of self-interest." Against the wildly dissimilar backgrounds of the open Serengeti plains and the dripping, disease-ridden forests of Gombe, Packer, a professor at the University of Minnesota, wrestles with the basic question of "Why be social?" Why DO lions and chimps live in groups? Why bother to cooperate?

To answer these questions, Packer works with well-studied populations. He builds up a detailed knowledge of each animal's personal history--who is related to whom, who breeds and who does not, and how many young survive to have families of their own. To maintain continuity in the data, he or his students must return to the study site every year, conduct a census of adults and record the identity and parentage of new offspring.

In "Into Africa," Packer deftly uses his latest trip as a framework on which to hang the story. Traveling with Packer is like birdwatching with Roger Tory Peterson or going into a kitchen with Craig Claiborne as your guide. The enjoyment comes not just from the insights into the lives of lions and chimpanzees but in getting to know Packer as a person. He shares impressions, motivations, fears, gossip and background rarely offered by biologists. He reveals himself to be engrossed more by the questions than by the animals themselves; he views baboons, chimpanzees and lions as "abstractions, like well-defined characters in a good novel."

The drive into the Serengeti Research Institute sets the park starkly in context. We see the Serengeti not just as a vast, wild grassland teeming with animals but as a 5,000-square-mile protected area embedded within a larger African civilization of hunting reserves, small towns, markets, agriculture and tourist lodges. Two million hungry people live within 50 miles of the park's western boundary, in a landscape where lines of snares and pit traps dot the riverbanks. This is not the Serengeti we think we know from television specials.

As Packer drives his graduate students around the study site, we, too, become immersed in the sights and sounds of the Serengeti. Later he explains how he began to unravel the Gordian knot of problems that surround the issue of cooperative hunting. While puzzling over the generally dismal show of cooperation displayed by hunting lions in the Serengeti, Packer tries to enter the mind of a selfish animal on a group hunt. "Think of a doubles match where your partner is the top seed at the tournament, and you are a rank amateur," he writes. "When the ball comes over the net, what are you going to do? Charge around and run yourself ragged, or hang back and force your talented partner to cover most of the court?" Among the selfish lions of the Serengeti, the answer is to hang back--as long as someone else is taking the mortal risk, don't bother to get up!

The lions of the Serengeti spend most of the year at the animal equivalent of a Christmas dinner table. Elsewhere in Africa, where prey is much scarcer, lions often do hunt cooperatively. These conflicting observations, once a source of argument, now fit neatly into the theory that animals hunt cooperatively only when they have to.

After a couple of weeks with the lions, Packer heads for Gombe, the site of Jane Goodall's three-decade-long study of chimpanzees. Compared with the "big sky" splendor of the Serengeti, Gombe is a dark, sodden place full of snakes, biting insects and steep hillsides covered with tangled vegetation. Fieldworkers constantly battle the elements just to move around, let alone follow baboons or chimpanzees and collect data. On one occasion, Packer and another researcher are caught in a tropical downpour: "The storm finally breaks free, and we can only brace ourselves, there is no place to hide. The air is white with rain; we stand facing the ground to keep from choking. The baboons sit like Buddhas with their eyes closed."

Returning after several years' absence, Packer scans the faces of the children and grandchildren of the baboons he studied years ago and remarks regretfully that there is no easy, objective way to recognize these animals. Unlike lions, they cannot be identified by whisker rows and spots, then catalogued in a card index file; their faces must be learned and stored in the minds of human observers.

Recollecting his student days at Gombe two decades earlier, Packer regales us with the highs and lows of living and working in this famous 12-square-mile patch of forest. In the early 1970s, when research at Gombe was at its peak, as many as 18 graduate students lived, played and worked there. Although field conditions were arduous and the hours incredibly long, a sense of community prevailed--"the Gombe spirit," as Goodall called it. Remarkable scientific discoveries took place there, including the first observations of cannibalism among chimps and chimpanzee warfare--male groups invading, attacking and cooperating to pin down and kill an opponent.

There were also hauntingly bad times at Gombe. A female graduate student died, probably having fallen off a cliff while following a group of male chimpanzees. One terrible night 40 armed men stormed the camp and kidnapped an administrator and three Stanford University students. Those events resulted in major procedural changes. In place of the graduate students, Tanzanian fieldworkers now do most of the chimp following but not just as uninvolved day laborers. They discuss their day in the forest in excited detail, relating new moves by the chimps and talking about who did what to whom. The spirit of discovery and teamwork remains. Gombe should be a model for long-term field studies everywhere.

Apart from longing for more photographs and a detailed map to follow Packer's journey, one closes "Into Africa" with a sense of satisfaction. Not only have we explored a part of the world that must rank high on the agenda of every armchair traveler, but we have ventured behind the scenes of the television specials on animal behavior to experience what it is like to be there, doing the research. We have come to know our guide and have enjoyed being with him despite, or perhaps because of, his driven, worried and intestinally challenged companionship. Packer has done what few have been able to do. He has put a face on a real wildlife biologist."--Review by Mel Sunquist and Fiona Sunquist

Book review written by: MEL SUNQUIST is an associate professor in the department of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida. FIONA SUNQUIST is a science writer and roving editor for "International Wildlife."