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I watched a Nat Geo special on DIan Fossey last night. I had not seen much about her for years since her death. While the intent of the program was to discuss circumstances leading up to her death. There was a lot of footage of her interaction with the mountain gorillas. It occurred to me, watching her go from barely being able to get close, to sitting there playing with the young ones, that her approach has a lot of merit. . Fast forward to my own experiences and what little I have learned. Some of what I have done is I have not reported. Some of you may have guessed but I guess I will still hold back. Still considering a book but I simply need more material. What she learned is that she always had to be submissive. She had to approach them literally crawling because if she stood up, they perceived it as a challenge and got a bluff charge response. If she was submissive, tentative, and even clowned around as if she was the biggest klutz in the world, they would watch her out of interest and let her get closer and closer. She acted her way into their midst. I know BF is a different critter. But experience after experience has shown me that they have similar behaviors. Urinate in their presence and they will react. Twice I have been bluff charged for doing just that. I suspect they thought I was marking territory. Dian became the world expert on the species. Before her little was known about them. She plunked herself right in the middle of there territory and stayed there for years in her camp in their territory. . Somehow I think we have to do something similar with BF. The Tarzan springs incident points to that as a valid tactic. It probably takes a female or a small group with a female included to pull it off. She brought men in but she had paved the way. I was surprised to see one of the scientists, who appears with Meldrum, on some of the BF documentaries, was there for a time in her camp. When we look at some of the more famous BF hunters, especially of the past, they came dressed and equipped like they were on an elephant hunt. Many armed appropriately. Some of these have never had contact. Dian had guns but it was to protect her from the poachers who ultimately killed her by hacking her to death with machetes. . Even that should be considered a warning for BF field researchers. If you find a tribe of BF in private timber company forest, you might be as unpopular as Dian was with the poachers. With millions of dollars of timber at stake, it could be very dangerous to expose BF to the world. Just some thoughts I wanted to share before I forgot about it.

I posted this recently on Incorrigible1's similar thread... Funny how they weren't interested in the tracks. Physical evidence? In the scientific and serious popular literature most of the debate has centered on the tracks which, whatever one makes of the sightings or the credibility of witnesses to the animal itself, undeniably exist. Skeptics usually explain these as the spoor of - conventional animals such as snow leopards, foxes, bears-or even wandering Tibetan lamas (who evidently do not mind freezing their feet)-and sometimes claim that melting has distorted their shapes into "yeti" prints. Though by now a virtual article of faith among skeptics, this last notion is a dubious one. Napier, no yeti believer, writes that "there is no real experimental basis for the belief that single footprints can become enlarged and still retain their shapes, or that discrete prints can run (or melt) together to form single large tracks."In any case, some of the tracks are found fresh-in other words, before the elements have had a chance to act on them. Among the more impressive incidents involving tracks is one that happened in 1972 to members of the Arun Valley Wildlife Expedition, a multidisciplinary ecological survey of a deep river valley in far-eastern Nepal where many rare animals and plants live isolated and undisturbed. Its participants, including leader Edward Cronin, a zoologist, were open-minded about the yeti's possible existence and even looked for evidence in the course of their two-year effort, but this was not the main purpose of their endeavor.On the night of December 17, Cronin and expedition physician Howard Emery, along with their Sherpa guides, camped on a depression at 12,000 feet in the ridge of Kongmaa La mountain. The next morning, when Emery awoke and stepped outside, he was startled to find footprints of a bipedal creature which had walked between the two tents sometime in the night. Nine inches long and four and three-quarters wide, perfectly preserved, the tracks showed, Cronin recorded, a "short, broad, opposable hallux, an asymmetrical arrangement of the four remaining toes, and a wide, rounded heel." They looked very much like a yeti print photographed by mountaineer Eric Shipton in 1951.Expedition members followed the prints for some distance. The creature had come up and down the slope to the north, crossed through the camp, and proceeded over the south slope. Then it returned to the top of the ridge. Its tracks disappeared down the south slope in scrub and rock. "The slope was extremely steep," Cronin wrote, "and searching for the prints was arduous and dangerous. We realized that whatever creature had made them was far stronger than any of us."