Russell Mittermeier has a running joke about Bill Konstant. The two have worked together, off and on, for more than four decades, and Mittermeier writes in the foreword to Wrestles With Wolves that Konstant seems to have a tolerance of roughly five years working directly for him before departing for another organization. Konstant has an explanation for that pattern. He has never been much interested in becoming a “company man.” Instead, he has compared his role to that of a catalyst in a chemical reaction — something that helps raise the energy of the system but need not remain once the reaction is underway. There have been plenty of reactions. Bill Konstant in the UAE. Photo by Jean-Christophe Vie Konstant has worked for the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, built conservation programs at zoos, and helped direct grants to field biologists working on threatened species. Much of his career has centered on primates, although the animals in his 2023 memoir range from golden frogs and rhinos to wolves, elephants and a squirrel his family raised when he was young. The route into professional conservation was less orderly than the résumé makes it look. At Cornell University, Konstant became an undergraduate teaching assistant for ornithologist Tom Cade, founder of the Peregrine Fund, whose work helped restore peregrine falcons after DDT contributed to steep population declines. Later, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Konstant took a job caring for and training chimpanzees. Jane Goodall had helped spark…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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