This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. Today, we're bringing

you tales from the field. Three stories about what it's really like to do field research.

These stories were recorded live at a gathering of Leaky Foundation Fellows.

Now, most pine-tingling tales of working in the field are about encounters with animals like hippos, lions, and venomous snakes.

Primatologist Kelly Stewart says that in the field,

you can have equally memorable and dramatic encounters

with the people you work with.

Kelly Stewart is a leaky foundation grantee

who studies mountain gorilla behavior and conservation.

In the 1970s, when she was a student,

Kelly Stewart worked with the legendaryilla researcher, Diane Fosse.

Diane Fossi was sent by Louis Leake to begin her study of the mountain gorillas in Rwanda in 1967.

And Stewart says Fossi was legendary for lots of reasons.

She's famous for setting up Karasoki Research Center and starting a long-term research on Mount Grillas. It still goes on today. She's famous for playing a large

role in bringing the Mountain Grillas back from extinction because when she got there in 67,

population was declining. That decline has been turned around.

Diane was also, perhaps not famous, but infamous, for not being that easy to work with

in the field.

And part of this was due to her fierce determination, her refusal to compromise, to somewhat of an

explosive temper and not being that diplomatic sometimes, but this was part of who she was.

Now, foreign researchers and Rwandan field team all received the force of Diane's personality.

And this is Sandy arriving for the first time in the Varungas as a little whippersnapper

...