When Nancy Briggs looked into Rusti’s big brown eyes, they connected. At their last meeting, he trailed his fingers along a cast that encased Briggs’ broken left wrist as if to ask if she was OK. Rusti is intelligent and compassionate, Briggs said, and she carries his picture in her wallet.

Rusti is not Briggs’ husband, boyfriend or child.

He’s an orangutan the Rolling Hills Estates resident helped rescue from a closing New Jersey zoo six years ago.

Helping orangutans, writing about them and teaching her students about communication — both human and animal — are Briggs’ passions. A professor of communications at California State University, Long Beach, Briggs has helped animals since 1967, when she and her husband rescued an orphaned cat they named Sweet Bippy.

In 1970, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Briggs began working with rescued animals in zoos, including a chimpanzee called Mr. C. Soon the zoo volunteer work turned into annual trips to the island of Borneo in Indonesia to study orangutans and collaborations with primatologists Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas, both of whom are near legends in the study of humans’ closest kin. They have made stunning discoveries of how great apes behave and their similarities to and differences from humans.

Briggs juggles her work with orangutans with her teaching and her husband and two children, now 26 and 28. She serves on the board of directors of the Orangutan Foundation International, a nonprofit organization founded by Galdikas and dedicated to preserving orangutans and their habitat.

Of the 11 board members, Briggs has a special place, OFI Vice President and co-founder Gary Shapiro said.

“She represents that part of the board that feels very close to the animals individually,” he said.

To further the goals of protecting, appreciating and studying the increasingly rare apes, Briggs is trying to set up a 12-acre sanctuary in Oahu, Hawaii, for unwanted orangutans like Rusti.

Working with OFI, Briggs said the sanctuary will be a haven where they will find safety and a place to roam unmolested.

When Rusti was rescued, he was living in an 8-by-10-foot cage. The proposed habitat will be a considerable improvement on that, though the animals won’t be allowed to “wander around Hawaii,” Shapiro said. Briggs says it is increasingly important to establish such open-air accommodations for the species, which experts predict could be extinct in the wild in a decade.

“A sanctuary lets orangutans live their own lives,” Briggs said.

Facilities like the Hawaii sanctuary and the existing Orangutan Nursery and Care Center outside Tanjung Puting National Park in Borneo, for which Briggs helped raise $100,000, are necessary, she said, because the animals number only 15,000 to 20,000 worldwide.

At one time, hundreds of thousands of orangutans existed and populated southern China and southeast Asia, but now have been exterminated in all of their former range except Borneo and Sumatra, Shapiro said. The main reason is the destruction and degradation of the forest, Briggs said.

“Orangutans are disappearing because the forest is disappearing,” she said. “The world is too overpopulated.” Human activity, including both legal and illegal logging, mining, settlements and road construction, is the primary reason behind forest depletion. Indonesia has lost 80 percent of its natural forest and continues to lose 6.2 million acres of forest annually.

Hunting and illegal animal trade also are reducing the orangutan population, Briggs said. Although, under Dutch decree, owning, possessing or selling orangutans in Borneo was made illegal in the 1930s, and Malaysia passed similar legislation in the ?s, there are still animal dealers that aren’t prosecuted.

Sanctuaries provide the animals with protection from such poachers, and offer space and safety, which help preserve the species and allow humans to learn more about the “marvelous, red creatures,” Briggs said.

The first phase of the Hawaii sanctuary is expected to be completed by late 2004, providing space to accommodate Rusti and two apes, Briggs said. Estimations of completion for phases two and three have yet to be determined as they depend on securing funds. Briggs estimates the total cost for the sanctuary at several million dollars, money that comes from OFI funds, private donations and grants.

Conceptualization of the project began nine years ago, Briggs said, when OFI realized Hawaii’s climate is ideal for rescued orangutans. The sanctuary will be built on a portion of the privately owned 4,000-acre Kualoa Ranch, located in the Kaaawa Valley on Oahu. Currently, OFI is seeking building permits and determining where exactly the sanctuary should be built.

Whether to build the sanctuary in a place more accessible to humans or someplace more secluded is a topic of debate for OFI, but Briggs just wants to help all of “God’s creatures.” Briggs, who grew up poor, is a devout Christian and Shapiro suspects that her strong faith is what draws her so close to animals. “Her generosity toward animals and people stem back to her religious beliefs,” Shapiro said. “I think she sees what we’re doing with the animals as God’s work.” The root of Briggs’ interest in orangutans is communication, namely the famous experiments in which great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans — were taught sign language. Communication interested Briggs at an early age as a champion debater from Huron, S.D., a town of 14,000.

Briggs was married at 21 and at 24 she received her doctorate in communication from USC. She began teaching communications at Cal State Long Beach in 1970, when she and her husband moved to the South Bay. She has taught more than 30 courses, including classes on storytelling, a passion she incorporates into her work with orangutans.

In 2000, the mother of two co-authored a comic book called “Talking” Orangutans in Borneo , which was designed to educate readers about orangutans’ capability to use sign language. “Stories are important,” Briggs said. “Sharing them encourages reading, studying animals and sensitivity to animals.” In 1999, Briggs collaborated with Galdikas to publish the best-selling Orangutan Odyssey , a book featuring 100 color photographs of orangutans, the only great ape of Asia, in their natural habitat.

Briggs said orangutans communicate nonverbally, in a precise, sensitive, understated way. Much can be understood about orangutans by observing their eye contact, body movement, posture, food sharing and mobility.

She said such behaviors are similar to that of young children regarded as shy, and orangutans’ linguistic expression through sign language is similar to children under the age of 5. Teaching her students about the similarities between human and orangutan communication increases sensitivity and understanding of animals, Briggs said.

“In the classes I’ve had with her, she’s always able to connect and correlate how animals and humans communicate,” said former student Wayne Stickney-Smith.

Stickney-Smith and Shapiro said her influence is undeniable.

“She’s a very passionate person. She’s dedicated to what she believes in,” he said. “She’s very supportive of what people are trying to accomplish. She was my favorite teacher.”

“I’ve never met a more generous person than Nancy,” Shapiro said. “She’s very gracious and giving.”

Regardless of her personal and professional successes, Briggs is modest and counts her achievements as blessings.

“I’ve been very blessed to know wonderful apes and have two wonderful children,” she said.

Find out more Orangutans and humans share 97 percent of the same genetic makeup. Male orangutans weigh 110 to 300 pounds and measure up to 40 inches from head to rump; females measure up to 30 inches and weigh 66 to 110 pounds.

Orangutans are vegetarians. They eat fruit, leaves, bark, flowers and honey.

Highly intelligent, orangutans make tools to scratch themselves, harvest food and protect themselves from bees.

Only 15,000 to 20,000 exist in the wild.

Orangutans are the only great ape of Asia.

Orangutans are stoic, solitary animals.

They are seven times stronger than humans.