conservationists and primatologists. Having received a MacArthur
Fellowship (aka the “genius grant”) in 1989, along with Madagascar’s
National Medal of Honor in 1995, she is known as “one of the very few
researchers who doesn’t just do the work, sit on their arse, and let
others deal with the repercussions,” says Duke University ecologist
Stuart Pimm. “Pat takes things way beyond the science.”
Wright was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 1944 and raised
on a small farm in Lyndonville, New York. She credits her early interest
in nature to the reading that helped her endure Lyndonville’s nearendless winters. She carried this interest to Maryland’s Hood College,
where she majored in biology and met her husband, James Wright.
After graduation, with James still finishing his degree at Brown, Wright
left her first and last lab job in the immunology department of Harvard
Medical School, where, she recalls , “What I had to do wasn’t the
most pleasant experience for me or the mice.” In 1967, she and her
husband moved to New York. Wright looked for biology work, but
without a PhD, the available positions didn’t cut it. Instead, she
took a job with the Department of Social Services, part of Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society program. And though she had never
lived in New York City before, Wright was assigned tough cases
in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods.
“What did I know?” she says. “I was this innocent, little farm girl.
I didn’t realize that most of the social workers who were assigned
cases in the ghetto didn’t actually go into the ghetto at all.”
But Wright would spend her lifetime going places women have
been told never to go alone, and Brooklyn was no different. Because
along—no easy feat because of laws written during that period to
combat the exotic animal trade. To make the return trip easier, Wright
decided her monkeys needed visas. She took two photos of Herbie
to the Colombian embassy—assuming nobody would notice they
were of the same animal—explained her situation, and hoped for
the best. “They were amazingly calm, like they got these requests
every day,” she recalls. “They told me to wait and then returned
with two visas.” So Wright got her visas, and after two months in
Colombia, Herbie had a bride. They named her Kendra.
After two years back in the States, Wright gave birth to her daughter,
Amanda, quit her job, and “got down to the serious business of being a
Brooklyn housewife.” That business got a little more serious when, two
weeks after Wright gave birth, Kendra followed suit. They named the
baby monkey Flower. And Flower raised a few questions.
“This was in 1973,” says Wright, “at the height of the sexual
revolution. Here I was a liberated woman spending all my time
caring for our daughter. But with owl monkeys … 93 percent of the
time, babies are with their fathers. It’s this amazing example of male
paternal care in primates—I just had to know more.”
Unfortunately, Aotus was one of the least studied of all primates,
and there just wasn’t the data to sate Wright’s curiosity. She did the
research herself. After striking out with grants—Jane Goodall didn’t
respond; the National Geographic Society said no—Wright found
Warren Kinzey, a City University of New York anthropologist and then
one of the world’s leading experts on primate evolution. “Hi,” she
began when she rang Kinzey. “I’m a Brooklyn
housewife who wants to study Aotus.”
Kinzey started laughing, but he didn’t
To travel with her monkeys, Wright concluded they
hang
up. Instead, a few days later, he
needed visas. So she took two photos to the Colombian
explained how primatologists work. Then
embassy. “They were amazinagly calm, like they got
he broke the bad news: A number of
these requests every day,” she recalls. “They told me to very prominent researchers had already
wait and then returned with two visas.”
attempted to study the owl monkey, but
none had succeeded. The problem was its
nocturnal habits. Even with radio collars,
this was the late 1960s, Wright also recalls showing up wearing “the tracking an owl monkey through a pitch-black rainforest had proved
most amazingly short miniskirts.” But it wasn’t the minis that people not only impossible but dangerous. Owl monkeys have a large home
remember—it was her diligence. “I really wanted to get things right,” range, and they share it with a full cadre of big cats, poisonous snakes,
Wright explains. “I allotted a whole day for each person and really got to and other Amazonian creatures that do their hunting after dark—the
know what the government was offering.” The job required her to write same time an Aotus researcher needs to be out in the field.
detailed reports, which turned out to be her introduction to field research.
But Wright knew something Kinzey didn’t. She had spent summers
“I was recording how people lived, but primate behavior is primate with her husband and their monkeys on Cape Cod, where she often
behavior—it doesn’t matter if you’re in Brooklyn or the Amazon.”
let the animals run free in the forest. They’d make a clicking sound
Wright was also a rock-and-roll fan and went to concerts every to communicate, and she knew she could use it monitor them. “I’d
weekend. She says she was on acid—“or something like that”—on tracked them on Cape Cod,” she explains. “I just didn’t think the
the way to a 1968 Jimi Hendrix show at the Fillmore East when she jungle would be that much of a problem.”
first encountered the primate that would become her lifelong passion.
In 1976, with her husband and 3-year-old daughter in tow, Wright
Ducking into a pet shop to get out of the rain, she saw an owl monkey: flew to Peru. Research at the New York Public Library had led her to the
a nocturnal, monogamous, South American primate of the genus eastern side of the Andes. But after a long flight and a 38-hour taxi ride,
Aotus. “He had beautiful, big, brown eyes and a built-in smile,” says she discovered the area she’d pinpointed had become a coffee plantation.
Wright, “He was irresistible.” She bought him and named him Herbie.
No one had seen a monkey there in more than 25 years. So Wright headed
Before long, the Wrights realized Herbie was part of a social species to a small airport and asked in broken Spanish, “¿Dónde están los monos?”
and that he needed some company (a fact reinforced by his tendency Turns out los monos were at Puerto Bermudez, deep in the heart of the
to destroy their apartment when left alone). So in 1971, they set out Amazon. A Cessna flew them to a remote, jungle landing strip. Amanda
for the jungles of Colombia to find their monkey a mate. Because they took one step onto the runway and screamed—less than 20 feet away was
couldn’t find anyone to look after Herbie, the Wrights brought him a Campa Indian in full battle dress. Wright walked over to him and asked a
80 | february-march 2008