The bonobo keeper commented how she always feels special if Loretta gives her a nod and I wondered how the ageing matriarch would register Dr Parish’s presence. The two females first met in 1989, when Parish was a fledgling PhD student and Loretta a youthful matriarch. Parish went on to spend all daylight hours, seven days a week, for several years documenting Loretta and her group. Since that study she’d paid regular visits. The primate and the primatologist had watched each other mature, become young mothers and practised elders.
