Public Biography
Jane Goodsome is the wildlife and nature correspondent for The New York Time5, a position created for her in 2018 after a decades-long career spent largely outdoors and, by her own admission, “away from desks, fluorescent lighting, and whatever it is people do indoors.”
Ms. Goodsome began her career as a field researcher in behavioral ecology, spending eleven years embedded with primate communities in Tanzania, Borneo, and a contested section of the Bronx Zoo. Her early published observations — including a landmark 1997 paper arguing that capuchin monkeys exhibit rudimentary contract law — drew both praise and formal objections from the American Bar Association.
She transitioned to journalism in 2006, filing her first dispatch for National Geographic from a blind she had been occupying in the Serengeti for what she described as “just under fourteen months.” The piece, a 9,000-word profile of a specific wildebeest, won a National Magazine Award and was optioned by HBO before the wildebeest died of natural causes during development.
Ms. Goodsome holds a Ph.D. in ethology from the University of Cambridge, where her dissertation — “Patience as Methodology: On Remaining Still for Extended Periods Near Animals That Do Not Want You There” — remains the longest single-author submission in the department’s history at 1,247 pages, not including the appendix of field sketches. She is also a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a lifetime member of the Jane Goodall Institute, which she insists is “a coincidence of name and nothing more, though obviously flattering.”
She is known for filing stories weeks after deadline, a practice the paper has accepted as an immutable condition of her employment. Her editor has described working with Ms. Goodsome as “like editing a nature documentary that hasn’t finished filming.”
Selected Coverage
- The 2023 migration pattern disruption among Eastern monarch butterflies, which she attributed to “a collective navigational disagreement”
- A six-part investigation into corvid tool use in Portland, Oregon, which prompted the city to reclassify crows as “skilled laborers” for zoning purposes
- The great Pacific octopus escape of 2024, covered from inside the tank