George Schaller is the last of the great naturalists and he will never be replaced. As Miriam Horn writes in her excellent biography, Schaller was ‘unmoored from his earliest days’ (p. 3). Born in Berlin in 1933 to a German diplomat working for Hitler and an ambitious American socialite, he was sent to boarding schools, and at the end of the war shipped to relatives in Missouri. He went to college in Alaska, receiving his Bachelor of Biological Science degree from the University of Alaska in 1955, before completing his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison 1962. His subsequent work took him to six continents where he walked thousands of miles, notebook and binoculars in hand and ‘winning the trust and acceptance of lions and tigers and bears, assimilating to their rhythms and rules, endeavoring to see the universe through their eyes’ (p 2).

Schaller has lived at the edges of human societies: from war-torn Germany to the equally war-torn Belgian Congo (as it was known then), from New York to Tibet. He was an outsider who never settled and was ever on the move. His chosen compatriots were not humans but animals, particularly big ones: gorillas, tigers, lions, pandas and snow leopards. With unprecedented patience he introduced himself to these animal societies and lived with them for years at a time. He was open to learning from them, from how they chewed, to how they mated, how they defecated and particularly what they ate. George Schaller eschewed the science of hypothesis testing, letting no preconceived notions interfere with what the animals themselves taught him.

He then turned around and taught us what his patience and keen observation had taught him. In books such as The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (1963), Mountain Monarchs: Wild Sheep and Goats of the Himalaya (1972), The Last Panda (1993) and Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe (1998) Schaller detailed with exquisite, painstaking attention the lives of the animals he observed, bringing to us an understanding virtually unmatched since Jean-Henri Fabre, the French master of insect studies (1823–1915).

Miriam Horn’s book is based on a century of correspondence, notebooks kept by Schaller and his family and countless documents saved through the course of a rich life. Most important amongst these sources was a trove of 70 years’ worth of Schaller’s field journals, including data records and narrative accounts—more than 20,000 pages now kept in the Yale Peabody Museum. Horn also interviewed both George and his wife, Kay, their two sons and four dozen colleagues in 16 countries. The author handles the richness of the material she had available beautifully, using Schaller’s own words to build a picture, which she then expands with perceptiveness, tact and an elegance of phrasing. For such a broad sweep in time and space, the book is remarkably carefully written and edited, notwithstanding the obligatory fact-checking quibbles: peccaries are not pigs, and a maracajá is not a jaguarundi but a margay.

The book, a long read at 606 pages, is exceptionally detailed and portrays a full picture of George Schaller. The diary and correspondence allow the reader to live through the suffering, thrills and disappointments of escaping conflict in Congo, battling bureaucracy in Brazil and experiencing deep angst over panda research, with its many complications brought on by the—often ill-intentioned—actions of NGOs and the Chinese government. It also touches on transcendent moments, often when Schaller is alone, and most often in the high mountains of the Himalayas or when he feels that he has become one with animals he is observing. It was to the Tibetan Plateau, featured in his boyhood reading of adventure tales, that Schaller returned decade after decade in his later life. In 65 trips he traveled by foot, camel, yak, donkey, tractor and truck; there has never been a conservationist so devoted to time in the field.

We are also treated to the richness of Schaller’s inner life through his diaries and his correspondence with his beloved and long-suffering wife, Kay. Outwardly, Schaller may appear gruff, plain-spoken with a penchant for straight talk. This exterior, however, camouflages a deeply sensitive and artistic person with a rich philosophical and poetic soul, and a fondness for adopting orphaned wild animals. And also a streak of whimsy, as shown by the book’s reproduction of delightful cartoons of field life sent to his family, often on the occasion of holidays or birthdays he missed.

George Schaller is much more than a patient student of animal behavior. He is an ardent conservationist who, from his earliest fieldwork under the tutelage of the legendary Olas and Margaret Murie, worked to establish protected areas to help conserve the animals he loved. From laying the groundwork for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to playing an instrumental role in establishing the spectacular Chang Tang (Qiangtang) Nature Reserve on the Tibetan Plateau (the world’s second-largest terrestrial protected area), Schaller was involved in creating parks and reserves throughout the world. Horn stresses that he understood early on that including forest dwellers, nomadic herders and other local and traditional peoples in these parks was a critical part of any success—a lesson that remains true today.

We all take turns pushing forward in the eternal task of finding balance between human and non-human lives. Horn’s book is titled Homesick for a World Unknown, which was true for the book’s protagonist (at least from the Eurocentric perspective). It is no longer true, or much less so, for the large animals and wild places that were Schaller’s focus, thanks to a profusion of data gathered and insights gleaned in recent decades. Schaller apparently never learnt to use a computer; he operated as a geographer with map and compass, not as a master of GIS or satellite images. He is what Horn calls an ‘endling’ (p. 552).

Many of my younger colleagues have never heard of George Schaller, someone who, for me, has been an inspiration for decades. I am sorry that young conservationists never met George; I hope they read this book. Although Schaller himself may be the last of his kind, his work, his sacrifice, his single-minded and ferocious work ethic, the people he trained and inspired, and his beautiful writing, will have a lasting legacy. Many animals owe their lives to the work done, and inspired by, George Schaller. One day in the hallway of the trailer that then housed the field programmes of the Wildlife Conservation Society he told me that ‘conservation is never done.’ So back to work for all of us, some of us knowing how much we owe to George.