Table Of ContentMONKEYS IN THE GARDEN
Irven DeVore and the Revolution in the Science of Social
Behavior
Sharon Pochron, Copyright 2016
Smashwords Edition
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Dedication
To Irv, who trusted me to tell his story. To Andy Boyles, who knew the importance
of Irv's contributions. And to all young scientists and historians who read this, I hope Irv's
humility, open-mindedness and curiosity inspires you as it did me.
Irven DeVore in 1950, nearly 16 years of age and about three years after he climbed a giant pecan tree
near the Sabine River to steal two owl chicks from their nest. He left one owl chick for its parents.
CONTENTS
Dedication
1 A Dangerous Climb
2 Growing Up in Nature
3 A Dangerous Descent
4 The Nature of Human Nature
5 The Most Persistent Man in the World
6 The Intelligence of Monkeys
7 Face to Face with Baboons
8 A Rude Introduction
9 Mammals of Africa
10 Alone in the Wild
11 The First In-Depth Field Studies
12 The Need for a Theory
13 The Man Who Was Pushed Aside
14 Kindling a Revolution
15 The Sum of a Life’s Work
16 The Nature of All Living Things
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Bibliography
1
A Dangerous Climb
I had no idea at the time, but I’ve since read that it’s one of the most dangerous things
you can do. You know, a great horned owl is big. Big talons. And if the mother caught me
fiddling with her nest . . . They dive on you and rip your skull off. A lot of people just
don’t survive an attack by a great horned owl, particularly at forty feet up.
—Irven DeVore
Thirteen-year-old Irven DeVore scanned the top of the ancient pecan tree, his eyes
locked on the messy nest of sticks and leaves. It must be forty feet up, he thought, a hard
forty feet up.
But he had to get there.
Squinting against the hot Texas sun, he considered. Should he use a rope? The huge
trunk grew at least ten feet before sprouting any footholds. If he swung a line over the
lowest branch, he could climb the itchy jute rope to the first big V.
A good idea—if only he hadn’t left the rope at home. He didn’t want to waste even a
minute walking there and back again. The nest was calling his name.
What would his scoutmaster do? Irv was a top Boy Scout, and he knew woodcraft.
There must be another way to the top.
He walked toward the trunk, glad for the shade of the tree. The trickling sound of the
Sabine River might be cooling, but the sun was hot.
Great horned owls are savagely protective parents. They sometimes use their razor-sharp talons to slice at
a person who approaches their chicks. Both the mother and father feed and protect their offspring.
Irv knew another boy might despise the impossible-to-climb tree, but he could do
nothing but respect it. He touched its gnarled bark. The peaks and valleys of the brown
wood spoke to the tree’s age as much as its massive size did.
An ant could lose itself in these crevices; a chipmunk could hide in one. What had
this tree seen in its long lifetime? What ancient people had enjoyed this very shade? Irv’s
fingertips danced over the tree’s deep crevices—and those gave him an idea.
Reaching into the grooves above his head, he leaned back, letting crabbed fingers
take his weight. Would the old bark hold him? Maybe. He paused. Then he put more
weight into his fingers. Small bits crumbled from the trunk and bounced off his hat—but
the bark closest to the tree’s heart held.
In that instant, Irv knew exactly what he’d do. Digging his bare toes into crevices
near the ground, he pulled himself up the trunk—not by much, maybe only by a hand’s
span.
The tree held. He did it again. The tree still held.
His satchel bumped over his hip as he crept up another short distance. Was it his
imagination, or was the V getting closer? He pushed the thought from his mind, knowing
he needed to stay focused. His toes were beginning to ache. He pulled himself higher
again. And then again.
Suddenly, his fingers couldn’t find a crevice. He sought a groove, any groove. His
toes hurt and didn’t want to hold him anymore. He shot a look up—and a crazy laugh
escaped him. He’d done it! He couldn’t find a crevice because he’d reached the V.
Leaning on a branch as thick as his dad’s thigh, he closed his eyes and breathed. A
light breeze cooled his skin, and the river sounded louder from up here. Irv pulled his
canteen from his satchel, took a long drink of water, and considered. The nest still
seemed far away. Sure, he might be ten feet closer to his goal—but he was ten feet closer
to the moon, too.
Wiping his brow, he studied the nest. It lay in the southernmost branch, which was a
good thing. That branch was fat. It could support a climbing boy such as himself. He
stood, his bare feet fitting themselves against the tree’s bark. Then he adjusted his satchel
and began to shimmy higher.
At first, the limbs were sturdy. But as he climbed toward his goal—first twenty feet
up then twenty-five—the branches grew thinner. Not much scared Irv, but when the wind
whipped through the paper-thin leaves and made the boughs beneath him sway, he
wondered—for the first time—about the wisdom of this idea.
As if on cue from God, the branch beneath his left foot snapped. He had to scrabble
to keep from falling.
One part of him wanted to quit, to go home.
But another part spoke in a louder voice. Ignore the fear, it said. You still have
branches under two hands and your other foot. You can do this.
Irv decided the louder voice was right. Disregarding his pounding heart, he placed
his bare foot on the next branch and breathed.
Soon he would have his chicks.
2
Growing Up in Nature
“My parents were never embarrassed to tell me I nearly ended up in the trash can
because 1934 was the bottom.”
—Irven DeVore
In the year that Irv’s mom gave birth to him, 1934, the Great Depression was
devastating people across the world. In rural Texas, where Irv grew up, farmers couldn’t
feed their families. Crops that had sold for a thousand dollars now fetched only four
hundred dollars. Without that income, farmers couldn’t pay their bank loans, and the
banks repossessed tractors, land, and houses. Farmers lost their homes and their ability to
feed their families.
By the time Irv had climbed that pecan tree in 1947, he’d seen things most thirteen-
year-old kids can’t imagine today. He’d gone to the grocery store with his mother and
found it nearly empty. His mom made almost all his clothes, but buying cloth was
difficult. Buying shoes was nearly impossible—not that Irv ever wanted to wear them.
Irven DeVore with his parents, Polly and Boyd, during the Great Depression.
The 1940s didn’t bring relief. In 1941, Japan bombed the Pearl Harbor naval base in
Hawaii, killing more than two thousand people. Some of the dead weren’t even in the
military. China, Japan, and nearly every European country were embroiled in World War
II, crippling global trade. No rubber could come from Malaysia, so no one could buy a
tire, even if they were lucky enough to own a bicycle or a car.
Life across the world and the United States was hard, but Irv and his two younger
brothers were protected. In the 1930s and early ‘40s, Greenville, Texas, was a great place
for a boy to live—especially a boy like Irv.
First, Irv never went hungry. His father was a popular Methodist minister, and when
his rural congregation couldn’t pay his salary in cash, they paid in food: home-canned
peaches, sides of pork, a chicken or two.
Irven DeVore, about age 7.
Second, Irv was never bored. On weekends, his scoutmaster showed him how to find
arrowheads in the desert and how to track animals through the Sabine River bottoms.
Because Irv was plucky and articulate, the scoutmaster selected him to shake hands with
President Harry Truman when he whistle-stopped through Greenville in 1948.
Perhaps best of all, Irv’s mother let him raise any animal he found—and he found a
lot of them. He had snakes and birds and lizards. He had squirrels and coyotes.
And—stuck out on that pecan tree limb above the Sabine River in 1947—he was
about to add owls to his collection of 103 animals.
When he was a boy, Irv DeVore kept many wild animals, including a coyote like the one shown here
pouncing on a small prey animal. Today, only trained wildlife rehabilitators and others with special
training and permits should keep wild animals.
3
A Dangerous Descent
“And you know crows and owls are implacable, ancient enemies.”
—Irven DeVore
The wind whistled through the leaves as Irv clutched the slender trunk with his
knees. He had never climbed this high before. Still, he didn’t look down, and he refused
to acknowledge the fear beating in his chest.
Instead, he kept his sight on the goal. He could see the dried pine branches and
desiccated grasses in the nest. He could see dried bird poop and bits of fur. His shins and
knees were skinned, and the palms of his hands stung, but he didn’t care. He was almost
there.
The narrow branches waved as he began to shimmy the last short distance. Would
the chicks be there?
For the last month, he’d watched both parents sitting in the pile of sticks. Then he’d
seen the mother owl bringing food to the nest. He’d seen the father owl, who was a little
smaller than the mother, do the same.
In the wild, crows often join together in groups to “mob” owls, which means to chase them away or even
kill them. People who hunt crows often set up owl decoys. When a crow sees the fake owl, it makes a
beeline to attack it.
He stopped climbing for a moment, and he listened. He heard no chirping, no sounds
an owlet might make. What if they’d died? What if a crow had eaten them?
Breathing hard, he climbed the last few inches. He was there, but he couldn’t see. A
thick crop of leaves stood in his way. Reaching out, he pushed the branch from his face,
and . . .
What a find! He would have been happy with one or two chicks, but he’d found
three.
For a heartbeat, they stared at him in silence. Then they opened their tiny beaks.
They were hungry!
Grinning, he shifted the satchel at his hip. He wasn’t an owl, but he would be an owl
parent shortly. Using his knees to clutch the branch beneath him, he scooped up two of
the chicks and put them in the bag. He left the third chick for its parents.
Irv didn’t let jubilation get the better of him, even as the owlets squirmed in his
satchel. He was still forty feet up in a tree, after all. But he was a scout, and he knew that
getting down was easier—or at least quicker—than getting up.
Taking particular care not to bump his fragile cargo against the waving branches, he
continued to climb along the branch, past the nest. Slowly, the bough bent, not toward the
ground but toward the neighboring tree.
Slowly, it bent. Slowly, slowly. Except then the branch wasn’t bending slowly—he
was in freefall! For the briefest second, he wished he had wings.
When his shins banged against the solid branches of the neighboring tree, he
breathed easier and found his footing. This tree, also a pecan, had a huge black lightning
strike he’d noticed earlier. Nothing could be easier to climb.
With a laugh that was almost triumphant, he looked at where he’d been just minutes
ago—twenty feet higher than he was now. Man, that was fun!
But the nest snagged his attention away from his sense of accomplishment. Great
horned owls don’t build their own nests. They find empty homes and take them for their
own. To whom had this nest originally belonged? It was big, nearly two feet around, and
a jumble of large sticks stuck out at off angles. Not many birds could carry sticks as large
as these. As Irv easily climbed down, he realized something: the nest he’d just raided had
originally belonged to crows.
Ironic, he thought. His feet hit the ground, and he turned toward home. Crows and
owls hate each other, but an owl was happy to use a crow nest.
He’d seen the hatred with his own eyes when he watched crows mob great horned
owls. And he’d seen more proof in small masses of undigested food, regurgitated by great
horned owls. Some of those owl pellets contained the bones of adult crows. Owls and
crows . . . not friends.
But Irv wondered: if he raised owl chicks together with crow chicks, would it matter
that the two species were implacable enemies?
He didn’t know. His head told him the owls would eat the crows. His gut told him
they’d get along. Which was right?
The scent of the Sabine River filled his nose, and he realized he was hungry. He also
realized something else: he’d have to find some crow chicks. He had to test his
hypothesis.
