Delfi's Grains of Golden Sand-Bonobos

Learn about a rare ape -- the bonobo, and follow the adventures of an intrepid woman who overcame the near impossible in a struggle to save just a few ecological "Golden Grains"

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Jaguar Genetics

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This female jaguar, Zassi, is enjoying a fish embedded Popsicle at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. She is wild-born, on loan from the coun...

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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Pronghorn Antelope Exam

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The Lee Richardson Zoo in Garden City, Kansas was well known for its productive pronghorn antelope herd when I worked there several years ag...

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Money That Encircled the Planet

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These are cowrie shells, from a mollusk ( Cypraea moneta ) found in the Indian ocean. Cowries represented the first and the most widespread ...

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Kinshasa Market Scene

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The Polaroid camera I gave to the market informants enabled me to get snapshots of how business was transacted in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the D...

Friday, July 24, 2009

Tanapox

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This is tanapox, photographed in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While sampling animals for monkeypox virus, I also collect...

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Old Kinshasa (Leopoldville) Map

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This old map (someone wrote "1956" on it) was of the city I knew as Kinshasa, Zaire. The country was called the Belgian Congo and ...

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About Me

Delfi: I was an animal conservationist in Africa for 14 years. During a major uprising in Zaire, when bullets were flying, I did not flee. Instead, I spray-painted the word "AIDS", in blood, on the entrance of the compound where I had struggled for years to rescue orphaned bonobos -- a rare ape found only in that country. I stayed on and five years later, I managed to get 6 bonobos to safety in a Dutch zoo, where several, and their offspring reside to this day. I returned to the US in 1998 and wrote a book called Grains of Golden Sand. Unlike other books of its genre, Grains of Golden Sand covers bonobo natural history while offering an insight into the culture and the constraints of doing conservation in Africa. It is also a woman's story of facing and overcoming incredible hardships that most can only imagine.

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