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domingo, 5 de fevereiro de 2012

A grande migração (os gnus, em África) - uma jornada épica

Pessoalmente, já tive a alegria e a felicidade de poder ver e sentir, na pele e no tempo cronológico, um pouco deste acontecimento ambiental extraordinário.
O vídeo é mais um aviso, dos muitos avisos que temos de conhecer e pensar.



(CBS)  If you could go just one place, anywhere on the planet, to see the most spectacular wildlife, you'd want to head east to catch a sight that comes around every year, but only for a short time.

It's called the "great migration," an endless march of life, and death and rebirth for millions of animals. When you see it, you might agree this is one of the greatest shows on Earth. We thought you should see it now, because there's no guarantee that it'll be around forever.

There was a time when epic migrations were common, when millions of buffalo in North America were on the move, for example. But today, to see what that must have been like, you have to travel to East Africa.

Photos: The Great Migration
Link: Mara Triangle

There, in late summer, more than a million wildebeest cross the volcanic plain of the Maasai Mara in Kenya, pushing through one of the most awe-inspiring wildlife habitats on Earth. Nearly everything Africa has to offer can all be found in one place - zebras, giraffes, elephants, lions, crocodiles and more.

The dry season is moving the herds, concentrating them where there is still grass and water. It's a march of 350 miles, up from the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania to the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya and back again.

American scientist Robin Reid was hooked the very first time she saw it as a student.

She's on the faculty at Colorado State University and has spent decades studying the animals and the Maasai people who share the land with the Mara migration.

"We don't have migrations anymore this large. So, this is the only one that stands by itself that is this large," Reid explained to 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. "Now, if you're talking about butterflies or you're talking about birds, you're talking about, you know, smaller animals, absolutely. You easily get up into these kinds of numbers. But as far as big animals that are walking long distance, this is the one."

According to Reid, it's the largest great migration of this size on Earth.

"Wildebeest" is Dutch and Afrikaans for "wild beast," which may refer more to its appearance than any ferocity. It's a relative of the antelope but it's unlike anything you've ever seen.

"They call lions regal, and elephants majestic. I wonder what you'd call a wildebeest?" Pelley asked.

"I think they look insane," Reid replied, laughing. "Their horns are kind of, you know, this way and that. And then they have these big shoulders. And why in the heck is that? And they're a funny color. You know, they're not pretty. And they've got a long tail. You know, they're put together in pieces."

"Well, somebody once said it looks like an animal that's made out of spare parts," Pelley remarked.

"And that's very apt," Reid agreed.

(CBS)  Along with the wildebeest, there are hundreds of thousands of zebra, nearly half a million gazelles, all of them crossing the territory of predators including lion, hyena, and cheetah. Nearby, the 60 Minutes spotted one cheetah with her three newborn cubs.

And the biggest predators of them all are crocodiles that patrol the Mara River, which cuts right through the migration route.

The river crossing is easily the most dramatic point in the entire year-long migration. There comes a time that the wildebeest and their calves have to cross the Mara River. You can't believe how big these crocodiles are - one of them is at least 15 feet long.

But the wildebeest have to cross in order to feed, and the crocodiles know that.

A wildebeest may go through 10 migrations in its lifetime. And to see them hesitate at the bank, it's as though many of them knew what was coming.

Pelley and the 60 Minutes team watched as first, two wildebeest scrambled across, making it across to the other riverbank.

Then the next group took the plunge, this time right into the waiting crocs. A large crocodile struck at lightning speed and had the wildebeest's horns between its jaws. And within moments, a total of five crocodiles were ferociously attacking the wildebeest all at once.

Now it was a struggle to find enough water to pull the wildebeest down to drown. In the few days that it takes the herds to cross the river, the crocs will bring down enough food to last for months.

Once the wildebeest see where the crocs are, the herd runs upstream and surges across by the hundreds. No one can say how long this migration has thrived, but on the Mara River we began to see evidence that its future is not a sure thing.

Usually the wildebeest swim across, but now the river is very low.

"Could what has happened to other migrations in the world happen here?" Pelley asked Robin Reid.

"Of course. Of course. Absolutely," Reid replied. "The thing I'm most worried about for the future is the Mara River and the amount of water in it. It's just the, you know, kinda the main artery of the ecosystem and it's very important."

(CBS)  This vital artery that Reid is talking about is best seen from the air. The Mara River rises in a place called the Mau Forest and it meanders about 250 miles or so down to Lake Victoria. The Maasai tell us that there is less water in the river now than at any time they can remember.

Asked what impact it would have if the Mara River went away, Reid said, "We're not absolutely sure. But in the dry season it's the only thing that flows. And so if that water went away then the wildebeest population would collapse."

"What do you mean by collapse?" Pelley asked.

"You know, I don't actually know if there would be very many left, actually. Not just the wildebeest, it would be many of the other species that require water," Reid explains.

According to Reid, hundreds of thousands of animals would be lost. "In fact, the estimates are, and you know, this is a guess, is that if the river were to dry up completely, okay, in the very first week after it dried up we'd lose about 400,000 animals that would die."

"And, you know, maybe that's an overestimate. But, even if it's in a month, that's a lot," she added.

Pelley wanted to find out why the Mara River seems to be drying up. So he and the 60 Minutes team headed north to its source, the Mau Forest. The first thing you notice from the air are wheat fields where the trees used to be. And beyond the expanding farms, we headed toward smoke on the horizon.

On the ground, about five miles from the Mara River, Pelley and the team visited a clearing in the forest that wasn't a wheat field yet, but soon would become one. What happens before the forest becomes a wheat field is that char coalers move to the area and cut down the trees to make one of the principal fuels for cooking.

The Mau Forest is falling to a growing population that is trying to make a living off the land. For centuries, the Mau has been a sponge holding and releasing waters into the river. To scientists, the equation is simple: if there's no Mau Forest, there's no Mara River. And that means no migration.

Saving the Mau Forest has become a crisis in Kenya, pitting the government against its own people. The government has forcibly evicted as many as 50,000 settlers from the Mau.

We saw it in the village of Nkaroni, which was settled in the forest more than 30 years ago. The Kenyan government, back in the 1990's even gave some of the villagers title to the land.

"It says nature of title, absolute," Pelley remarked, looking at one of the title deeds. "You take it to mean absolute."

The villagers around him applauded in agreement.

(CBS)  But a new government has turned on them. Now it says to save the forest, villages like this have to go. In 2005, the government sent security forces to burn homes, schools and churches. But still the people refuse to leave.

"We will stay we will not go anywhere if they kill us they kill us," retired village chief John Sena told Pelley.

"You would die right here?" Pelley asked.

"Yes," Sena replied.

The villagers in the forest don't see why their families should be uprooted for a wildlife refuge they've never seen.

But 60 Minutes found a different story down river in the Mara itself, where the growing population of Maasai has been willing to compromise.

"The population is a wild problem it's growing and it's growing everywhere," said Dickson Kaelo, who works for a non-profit foundation that is paying the Maasai to turn over management of their land to a wildlife conservancy.

"Many of the families before the conservancy started were very poor and quite a number of them now are able to survive and diversify away from just keeping cattle," Kaelo explained.

The Maasai had been expanding their farms and grazing cattle near the migration routes. Now the conservancy manages their land for wildlife, tourists pay to see the wildlife, and the Maasai get a cut of the profits. Families we talked to say they bring in an extra $200 a month, enough to send the kids to school.

Kaelo has brought nearly 300 square miles under management and that's growing. "I think the children of our children of our children would like to experience the migration. It doesn't matter whether they are living in China or in the Far East or in America, they would like to know that the migration is still continuing," he said.

As the wildebeest moved out of the Maasai Mara, we could see the beginnings of next year's spectacle. The elephants were raising their calves, and that cheetah we encountered earlier was feeding her cubs on a waterbuck she'd killed.

Cheetah cubs chirp like birds. And if they survive, they will still be with their mother when the wildebeest come round again.
This perpetual cycle is still a robust force of nature. But with the Mara River running low and man crowding the route, no one can be certain how many turns are left for this, the last spectacle of its kind.

A linguagem secreta dos elefantes

Não consigo deixar de olhar para a história de Andrea Turkalo como a história de alguém que conheceu, compreendeu e seguiu a história de Jane Goodall. E ainda bem que o fez. Precisamos, para o bem da nossa própria espécie, destes animais e de compreendê-los, tal como precisamos dos chimpanzés de Jane Goodall e de compreendê-los.
 

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-6045121.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody

(CBS)  For two decades, a group of wild African elephants has been watched over, studied and protected by their own guardian angel: an extraordinary American scientist named Andrea Turkalo.

Turkalo's own story is pretty amazing, but not nearly as compelling as the insights into elephant behavior her research has revealed, especially when it comes to "the secret language of elephants."

Elephants communicate in a complicated, sophisticated language that scientists are trying to decipher and compile into the world's first elephant dictionary. When we heard that this is all happening in one of the most magical places on Earth - a remote clearing in Central Africa where forest elephants, the rarest, most mysterious, and most threatened member of the species congregate - we simply had to go.

The Sangha River flows through the Congo Basin along the border between Cameroon and the Central African Republic in the second largest rain forest on Earth. This remote corner of the world is the place Andrea Turkalo, a field

Turkalo lives in a compound that she and a group of Pygmies built from scratch. The Pygmies help her run the place.

Commuting to her job is a hike. The last couple of miles took us through some interesting terrain.

"Okay, now we're gonna enter the forest. And the advice I like to give everyone at this point is to stick together," Turkalo told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon. "Because if we happen to run into elephant, we should all stay together and move in the same direction so we don't confuse them."

A confused elephant could be dangerous. Fortunately, running into one on the trail is rare.

Asked who made the trail, Turkalo said, "This was made by hundreds of years of elephant traffic in this forest."

"If you look at their feet it's obvious. They do a lot of road work," she explained.

The elephants have stomped out the equivalent of a vast interstate highway system. It took us past giant teak trees, through a thick primordial forest.

Turkalo has hiked this trail twice a day for nearly 20 years. Where does it go?

We could hear them long before we could see anything. Suddenly, the trail ended, and right before us, was an opening called the Dzanga Clearing and more than 50 forest elephants.

The setting was extraordinary - straight out of Jurassic Park, tranquil, except for an occasional roar.

"Andrea, do you remember the very first time you saw this place?" Simon asked.

"Yeah. It was in the late 80s. And I actually slept here," she recalled. "And I slept on the ground in a tent. And all night there was this symphony of elephants. And when I woke in the morning it was like I had landed in Paradise."

Asked what she means by paradise, Turkalo said, "You know, there are so few places in the world today where animals are not being harassed by people. And this is one of them. And it's an exceptional sight."

The clearing is a watering hole, a spa and a sanctuary - a place where elephants take their time, the measured graceful pace of the largest land animal on Earth.

They come to the clearing for the minerals which they can't seem to get enough of. It's a place where elephants play, but nobody gets hurt.

Kids fall and get up the way kids do. One elephant was giving himself a massage - a tree massage. Another one was trying to hide, unsuccessfully.

(CBS)  It's a place of peace: the clearing where elephants and buffalo coexist. All this, and so much more, is observed by Turkalo and others day after day.

"It's been now 19 years that I've been observing this particular population of elephants," Turkalo told Simon.

She acknowledged that's a long time. "But it takes a long time to know elephants," she pointed out.

When Turkalo first came to the area, she knew almost nothing about forest elephants. Today, she's the world's leading expert on them.

From an observation deck on the edge of the clearing, she collects scientific data for Cornell University and the Wildlife Conservation Society. She watches elephants almost every day, for hours, counting their numbers and monitoring their health and observing their social behavior.

"What are the basic differences between the boys and the girls?" Simon asked.

"Females and their young stay together for longer periods of time. As you can see, these groups are made up of adult females and their young," she explained. "And bulls tend to leave their groups early and be solitary. But they occasionally meet up with their families and speak to each other."

"But the boys go off on their own and just sort of drop by now and then?" Simon asked.

"Yeah. They like adventure," she replied, laughing. "They don't like the group life."

Asked if there are other ways in which elephants are like humans, Turkalo said, "The females tend to like to be courted by older, experienced males."

"The young ones wanna get to the point too quickly," she explained, laughing.

When she heard the roar of nearby elephants, Turkalo knew it was the Penelope family. "It's their way of saying hello," she explained.

Turkalo knows it's the Penelope family because she named them and nearly a thousand other elephants. She also recognizes them by their voices, voices researchers are trying to translate into what could someday become an elephant dictionary.

"I find this elephant dictionary you're compiling exceedingly fascinating," Simon remarked. "I mean how large a dictionary will it be?"

"We don't know," Turkalo said. "We have to really know a lot more about the behavior of these animals to sort of sort out these different vocalizations and what they mean."

Turkalo's expertise brought her to the attention of Cornell University. Peter Wrege, a behavioral biologist from Cornell, says the dictionary is still in its early stages.

"We're in kindergarten. We're just learning the very first few words. And Andrea, in a sense, is the person who, I feel, is going to help us put those words together," Wrege explained.

"And you say we're in kindergarten now?" Simon asked. "Are we in the process of compiling the child's dictionary?"

"Even an infant's dictionary, it's a very, very complex process because we can't ask the elephant, 'What did you just say?'" Wrege said.

(CBS)  But they can match elephant sounds with behavior they can see, and classify those sounds into distinct categories.

Asked what some of them are, Turkalo said, "Well there's low frequency rumbles. It sounds like a big cat purring. And those are the vocalizations that help keep groups in contact with each other."

"In newborns you have a particularly very high cry. And when you hear it you know it's a very, very young calf," she explained.

"And some of these big bulls, when they go into musth, which is this sexual state they make a special rumble which is very low and very pulsing," she added.

Most days, Turkalo works into the evenings, compiling data and exchanging information with researchers back in the U.S. via the Internet, which she also uses to stay in touch with home.

The archive of elephant behavior and sound she has created is amazing and surprising.

Some noises that sound fearsome to human ears are actually elephants greeting one another.

Back in 2000, Turkalo filmed the death of a baby, and the traumatized cries of the other elephants. The elephants kept poking the body, over and over, frantically trying to coax the baby back to life. The elephants formed a procession that filed past the body.

"They'd feel it or they'd smell it. And then they'd vocalize," she explained. "It was like a funeral procession that went on three or four days."

"They seem to recognize death, and it upsets them. It sort of brought home how emotional these animals are," she added.

But it turns out that these vocalizations are just a small fraction of the sounds elephants make. Until a few years ago, scientists had no idea that most of what elephants are saying can't be heard by the human ear.

"The base of their vocalization is infrasonic. In other words, the frequency on which their call is built is below what we can hear," Peter Wrege explained.

The elephants use those low sounds to find one another in the dense forests where they spend most of their time. "Elephants are using very low frequencies in their vocalizations which travel far," Wrege said.

Wrege told Simon these low frequencies have a reach of about two or three kilometers - more than a mile.

Six thousand miles away, in upstate New York, at a lab at Cornell University, researchers are listening to everything from the sound of hummingbirds to the sound of whales.

The Elephant Listening Project grew out of an accidental discovery made by its founder, Katy Payne, one of the world's leading experts on elephant communication.

"I love animals. Right? So I went to the zoo," Payne remembered. "The elephant cage, and I began to realize that I was feeling a throbbing in my ears and in the air that I couldn't really explain. And I said 'You know, do you suppose that elephants are making sounds that are below the pitches that I can hear?' And we recorded for a month and, lo and behold, we found that elephants had a great many sounds that people didn't know about."

"But then how do you discover the meaning of these sounds?" Simon asked.

"You just watch and watch and watch, and record and record and record and keep the two together," Payne explained.

(CBS)  Which brings us back to Andrea Turkalo. Once or twice a year, she visits Cornell with her latest recordings.

"This is a scene we filmed on the first of May, and it's actually the first birth we've witnessed in nineteen years," she explained.

After oohing and aahing over the new baby, as anyone would, the scientists get down to the business of figuring out what the elephant sounds mean.

Figuring out which elephant is talking, where it's located and what its saying has been a big challenge.

Researchers initially strung nine acoustic recording devices around the clearing. As the sound reached each recorder at a different time, they could pinpoint the location of the speaking elephant.

Picking up sounds too low to hear was another challenge, but recording the sounds normally and playing them back faster was a revelation.

For example, the clearing at night sounds like just like crickets, but play back the recording three times faster, and you can pick up the rumbles of elephants.

But to figure out what the calls mean, the Cornell team spends more time looking than listening. Using computer-generated spectrograms, they can see the low-frequency sounds.

"And what does this visualization tell us?" Simon asked Peter Wrege.

"It tells us that there's incredible complexity. Many of their calls are actually similar in some ways to human speech," he explained.

Asked if this research into elephant sounds has any practical purpose, Wrege told Simon, "We're using sound recordings to monitor forest elephants because they are so difficult to see. And this becomes more and more critical because their population is threatened. So, knowing where the animals are gives us a way to begin attacking what has to be preserved or where do we need to put more protection."

"Protection," because poaching has become almost epidemic: it is estimated that annually ten percent of Dzanga's elephants are killed for their ivory.

Turkalo works closely with Dzanga's armed guards, but so far their efforts have not stopped the slaughter.

Asked if she sees it as her personal responsibility to protect the elephants, Turkalo said, "I've made it my personal responsibility for me if I've been given this great privilege to study this particular population of elephants I think my priority is to protect them. Otherwise I have no right to study them."

Turkalo believes if she weren't here, the clearing would become a killing field.

"It's clear that, in a very pragmatic sense, you are saving the elephants," Simon remarked.

"But in another sense, they've saved me," Turkalo said. "I have something very important in my life to do. And I think a lot of people don't get to do that."

Turkalo plans to stay there at least another 15 years. And as night falls over her clearing and fishermen float gently down the Sangha, you can hear the crickets.

What you can't hear, are the elephants. But that doesn't mean they aren't talking.

Jane Goodall - do entusiasmo inicial à sabedoria consolidada

Este vídeo de Jane Goodall mostra-nos várias coisas:

  1. Para conhecer precisamos de dedicar tempo, muito tempo!
  2. O conhecimento não é coutada, ou exclusivo dos cientistas encartados.
  3. Estamos, de facto, todos no mesmo barco; ou, de outra maneira, somos mesmo todos da tal aldeia global.
  4. Cada um de nós tem mesmo uma maneira de poder responder à pergunta: "Que posso eu fazer?...". "Como posso eu ajudar?..."
 

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-6978973.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody

(CBS)  Humans share more than 98 percent of the same DNA with chimpanzees, which is probably why there has always been a fascination with them. What we know of them is mostly because of one woman, whose name has become synonymous with chimps: Jane Goodall.

She was launched to fame by National Geographic, whose stories about her life in an African forest with chimpanzees made her an iconic figure.

Goodall was the first to discover that wild chimpanzees were capable of making and using tools, a revelation that turned the scientific world upside down by challenging the convention that tool making was what made humans unique.

Fifty years later, Goodall considers her role now to be more important than ever - which is why "60 Minutes" and correspondent Lara Logan wanted to go back with her to Africa.


60 Minutes Overtime: Jane Goodall
Lara Logan talks about her profile of Jane Goodall and how she and producer Max McClellan hit the "chimp jackpot" on their trip to Tanzania.

Photos: Visiting Goodall's Chimps
Extra: Lara Logan Facebook Chat
Extra: Why Goodall Went to Africa
Extra: Goodall on Motherhood
Extra: Goodall, A Girl in Africa
Extra: Goodall's Global Efforts
Link: The Jane Goodall Institute
Link: Roots & Shoots
Link: National Geographic Jane Goodall Retrospective

Goodall and the "60 Minutes" team headed to the Gombe Forest; the only way to get there is by boat.

"The hills there, you know, which are like a desert now? When I arrived in 1960, in July, those hills were forest," Goodall observed during the boat ride.

We traveled with her across Lake Tanganyika, the longest lake in the world, and then into the forest which Goodall called home for decades.

She first came to Tanzania, to a stretch of tropical forest on the remote eastern shores of the lake, to study chimpanzees when she was 26 years old. She was a young girl from England with no scientific training - just a notebook and binoculars.

"How would you describe what it was like 50 years ago?" Logan asked Goodall.

"It was a kind of magical place where I never knew each day what I might see or discover," she replied.

We followed the forest trails for hours through the towering trees and tangled vines searching for Goodall's chimpanzees. Then, the chimps' unmistakable sound led us right to them.

Goodall instantly recognized her favorite family, three generations right there in front us. She has followed this family for 50 years and gave them the names they're still known by today.

Asked what she loves about them, Goodall said, "Just everything."

There was little "Google," at nearly two years old one of the youngest there. There was also Google's mother "Gaia," who Jane has known for 17 years.

His grandmother "Gremlin," Goodall says, is one of the oldest and most gentle chimps in the forest. She has known her since she was born in 1970.

They also spotted 12-year-old "Glitter," Google's aunt.

Today, the chimps are so used to humans they don't mind getting close.

But since it's now known that chimps can catch our infectious diseases, we had to keep a safe distance.

When Goodall arrived in the forest in 1960, she had the opposite problem.

At first, the chimps didn't want to come near her. "First they were afraid. Then they became belligerent. And then when I wouldn't go away, well, 'I guess she's ok.' They came to trust," she recalled.

(CBS)  That trust allowed Goodall to enter the world of these wild animals. The personal details she spent years documenting today constitute the largest scientific database in the world for this species.

"It was obvious watching them that they could be happy and sad," she told Logan. "And then the communication signals, kissing, embracing holding hands, patting on the back, shaking the fist, swaggering, throwing rocks. All of these things done in the same context we do them."

"How did you see their sense of humor?" Logan asked.

"I've seen a mother laugh when she hears her older child who hasn't paid attention and he hasn't noticed which way she's gone. And the older child is going through the forest, whimpering, crying, you know. And the mother's up in the tree, quite quiet. And you hear her going, just laughing," Goodall explained, while mimicking the chimpanzee calls.

We spent 12 hours in the forest with Goodall, before we witnessed firsthand what made her so famous: the chimpanzees were using sticks as tools to fish for termites.

Her discovery was initially received with some skepticism. "Some of the scientists thought I had taught them," she explained.

"That would have been quite an achievement," Logan remarked.

"Especially, as I couldn't get near them back then. It would have been very clever," Goodall replied.

With the discovery came research funding from the National Geographic Society.

And fame: she and her work were featured in National Geographic movies, including "Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees," narrated by Orson Welles.

"The films and the magazines took this early footage all around the world. But particularly to the U.S.," Goodall remembered. "It changed everything."

"And made you world famous," Logan remarked.

"The chimps made me famous, yes," Goodall replied.

We watched some of the old films - images that captivated the world.

"There was definitely a bit of 'Beauty and the Beast.' I mean, I know that," Goodall said, laughing. "This young girl, I see myself back then, when I look at myself. And I, 'Yeah, no wonder the men fell in love.'"

In one movie, a chimp named "Figan" was filmed playing with Goodall. "We didn't know back then that chimps caught all our infectious diseases. There wasn't any feeling of doing anything wrong. It was amazing, incredible to be able to have that relationship with wild animals wasn't it?" she said.

It was Goodall's childhood fascination with animals that brought her to this remote corner of Africa to study them.

"Did you have a real sense of purpose when you landed on the shores?" Logan asked.

"No," Goodall said. "I think I had a real sense of adventure."

Asked if she fell in love with Africa, Goodall told Logan, "I fell in love with Africa long before I ever went there. When I got there it felt like coming home."

"How would you describe the Jane of those days?" Logan asked.

"Very naïve, shy. Very determined. Always slightly startled that things were working out. And a terrible flirt," Goodall said.

"Was that well received?" Logan asked.

"Tell me you weren't," Goodall joked.

"This is not my story!" Logan replied.

(CBS)  While Goodall's work had a huge impact, it was sometimes undermined by the fact that she had never studied science.

"Was it hard to be taken seriously by the scientific community?" Logan asked.

"Oh, I was not taken very seriously by many of the scientists. I was known as a 'Geographic' cover girl," she replied.

Asked what she thought of that, Goodall said, "Well. I didn't care. At least I didn't think I did. Because you know, I was studying these chimpanzees and if people thought I did it wrong, well, let them go and do it differently. But let me do it my way."

But there was something she didn't like about the chimps: "I hated the fact that they could be very cruel and brutal and that they have a dark side just like us," Goodall told Logan.

Another of Goodall's discoveries: chimpanzees kill their own species, one more way they resemble humans.

Goodall said this discovery surprised her. "I thought they were like us, but nicer."

"And they're not?" Logan asked.

"No, they're just like us," Goodall replied.

At times, it was very dangerous for Goodall.

A chimp named "Frodo" was particularly violent and nearly killed her one day. "He flipping well came up, and dragged me down, stamped on me. It hurt. He bashed my head onto a rock, and it was bleeding. And then he went away, and I thought 'Oh well I've survived.' And then he came back. And did it again. And then he pushed me over the edge. And if there hadn't been some little bushes growing there, I wouldn't be here now, 'cause it was a way big drop," she remembered.

There's also footage of Frodo's older brother "Freud." Although he looks menacing, Bill Wallauer, who shot the footage, says it's just a show meant to intimidate.

Wallauer came to Africa to work for the Jane Goodall Institute and lived in the forest for 15 years.

The institute carries on Goodall's work in Africa through Wallauer and a team of researchers and scientists, who come from all over the world.

(CBS)  Goodall says she would still be living in the forest, but that she had to leave to try to save the chimpanzees. Their numbers have been falling ever since she arrived there, from over a million then to less than 300,000 today.

Poaching and loss of habitat have made them an endangered species.

At age 76, that keeps Goodall on the road 300 days a year. From the halls of Congress, to the stage of a packed rock concert, to a school in Uganda, she's constantly raising money and raising awareness.

Protecting chimpanzees is still at the core of Goodall's mission today. She's helped create four sanctuaries, including one in Uganda, for orphaned chimpanzees and she has inspired 15 more across Africa.

"What are the reasons their mothers are killed?" Logan asked.

"Well, sometimes it's bush meat and there's still some of the live animal trade going which means you shoot the mother to take the baby," Goodall said.

Asked how urgent it is to save these creatures, she said, "Well, if they weren't here they'd be dead."

As much as Goodall loves chimpanzees, there's something about her they seem to love: while "60 Minutes" cameras were rolling, one young chimp stood on her shoulders and played with her.

They young chimps we encountered were so like children: playful, curious, and very affectionate.

All of the chimps at the sanctuary we visited had been vaccinated against a range of infectious diseases. To get this close to them, we had to be vaccinated as well.

(Editor's Note: The Jane Goodall Institute does not endorse handling or interfering with wild chimpanzees. The chimps being handled in this broadcast are orphans who live at a rehabilitation center.)

For us, it was a final glimpse into Goodall's world: the woman who bridged the divide between humans and animals and changed the way we think about them.

"We're part of the animal kingdom. Not separated from it. We could have a blood transfusion from a chimp if you matched the blood group. You really could. And the other way around too," she explained. "People say to me, 'Thank you for giving them characters and personalities.' I didn't give them anything. I merely translated them for people."