After I finished college, I worked for the World Wildlife Fund, where I discovered that few scientists had ever studied an endangered primate from Madagascar called the aye-aye. In college, my professors used the aye-aye as the exception to almost every rule about primates. I liked that. I became determined to go to graduate school and study the aye-aye.

So I went to Madagascar. I worked with field assistants. It took us five months to get a radio collar on an aye-aye and another month for the aye-aye to get used to us. We all played "Red Light, Green Light." The aye-aye would look at us, then look away, and we would scramble closer. The game kept up until we were near enough to watch him closely with binoculars.