Photos: World-renowned chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall visits the Oakland Zoo

Call Jane Goodall chimpanzee royalty if you will.

It was only fitting that the chimps at the Oakland Zoo hooted and grunted with apparent delight as Goodall, the world’s leading expert on the simians, arrived on Thursday morning.

Goodall mimicked their call, and the troop responded to her with a cacophony of sounds as she rode past their habitat in a golf cart before giving a talk during her “Roots & Shoots” program at the zoo.

A spry 88, Goodall was born in Hampstead, London, in 1934 and began studying chimpanzee behavior at Gombe Stream National Park in 1960 under the direction of Kenyan archaeologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey.

She had always been drawn to animals, and to Africa, after her father, Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, gave her a lifelike toy chimpanzee named Jubilee when she was just over a year old. She still has the toy at her home in London today.

“Right from the beginning I was fascinated with animals,” Goodall told the students, who were captivated by the soft-spoken yet self-assured woman.

Goodall, the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) & UN Messenger of Peace, spoke to 100 Oakland Unified School District students, the Zoo’s Teen Wild Guides and JGI’s Roots & Shoots youth activism program students about her life’s work and stories of hope for people, animals and the environment. Roots & Shoots encourages young people to make positive changes in their communities.

“She’s pretty cool. I like her determination and her love and compassion for the animals,” said Kamsi Okeke, 13, a Northern Lights School student whose family is from Nigeria.

It wasn’t Goodall’s first time at the Oakland Zoo. She last visited 15 years ago for the unveiling of a progressively designed gibbon habitat.

“It’s good to be back and see all of the improvements that have been made,” Goodall said.

During the talk, Goodall paid tribute to her mother, Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, as having the most influence on her life than anyone else.

Goodall recalled that when she was 1½ years old, she took a handful of wriggly earthworms to bed with her.

“Jane, you have to put them outside now or they will die,” her mother told her.

As she was introduced to the wild applause of both students and adults, many visibly tearing up, and her many accolades cited, Goodall humbly replied: “My goodness. I just wonder who’s meant to be standing here, because having heard all of those attributes given to someone, am I really all of those things? I feel I’m just me, and the one standing here and talking to you now is just plain Jane.”

Caitlyn Alegre, an English teacher at the nearby Northern Lights School in Oakland, who was in attendance with her students, first met Goodall when she was 7, and at that young age was concerned about laboratory tests on animals. She also lived in Tanzania for several months, where she got to work with Goodall at Gombe and got very involved in her Roots & Shoots program, spreading their environmental message to refugee camps.

“She brings me to tears all of the time. It’s like a homecoming. It feels like going back to Africa,” Alegre said.

Along with talking about her background, Goodall spoke about the preservation of the environment, climate change and the protection of animals in the wild who have been threatened by hunting, poaching and deforestation. She was asked by a student what she thought of animals who had been rescued from these situations and brought to zoos.

“A good zoo like this is a much nicer place for animals to live,” Goodall said.

Though of course, it’s ideal for the animals to be in the wild, she said it was key for chimpanzees and other animals to not suffer boredom while in a zoo, and have an enriched and engaging habitat.

“You’re all very lucky to be in traveling distance of a zoo that’s as good as this one,” Goodall told the students.