Jeannette Hanby

Here I am with your eyes on my words. Who am I to you? An author? A person you'd like to know more about? I've lived a challenging, adventurous life and want to share with you my stories. The books I've written with my artist husband will be the best way to get to know us. Here I give you a brief summary of some major happenings.

My world perspective comes from growing up in Southern California. I watched the creeks, citrus groves, and oak hillsides slashed and mutilated into suburban housing tracts and heartless shopping malls. I've been super sensitive to "Progress" and "Development" ever since. Being in natural habitats soothes and fascinates me. But to earn my way to to the world's wilds I've had to learn my way through conventional, human mazes.

Psychology was my major at University California Berkeley. I needed to understand the physiology and behavior of humans. While there, I was caught up in the flavor and fervor of the early 1960s. After college, I had lessons in the current social scene when working with abused and abandoned children in dystopic Los Angeles County. Then came the joy of learning more about nature while living on the Big Sur coast and gold-mining on the Feather River. Those adventures and lessons are the stories I tell in "Feathered Canyons".

Four years in graduate school at the University of Oregon earned me a PhD in animal behavior. That achievement earned me an invitation to manage a primate research project at U of Cambridge in England. There I met and married fellow primatologist David Bygott. who'd studied chimps in Tanzania with Jane Goodall. We returned to Tanzania together, dropping into a relatively undisturbed natural part of the planet: Serengeti. A dream realized. We studied Serengeti lions and through their eyes, the whole ecosystem. Our book, "Lions Share" gives that perspective: Serengeti from the lions points of view.

Family events in England and a lecture tour in the USA took us into new realms. We returned to Tanzania to "give back" some of the lessons and joy of our years there. I helped establish a conservation education program for Tanzanian schools. David suffered malaria and hard times trying to teach zoology on the coast.

Circumstances forced us to abandon education and employ our other skills as free-lance wildlife interpreters, tour guides, writers, and artists. Being independent, we indulged our curiosity about the fascinating groups of peoples living in a remote part of the Great Rift Valley - the Lake Eyasi basin. There we learned about traditional cultures and survival in a Tanzanian village.

The village let us lease a unique plot of land next to a vibrant stream. We built little houses. acquired friends and dependents. We learned from local people, archaeologists, geneticists, anthropologists, biologists and wanderers. They gave us insights into how we became human and adapt to environments. Our books "Spirited Oasis" and "Beyond the Oasis" tell stories from those village years.

Eventually, we needed to seek a more stable base. A place to hunker down, reacquaint ourselves with modern life. As the new millennium unrolled, we moved to a different kind of village, an intentional community in Arizona. We continue to learn, explore and share. So now, open one of our books and come on a safari with us.