By Marianne Betts
December 06, 2008
Source: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24757694-661,00.html

AS FAR as mercy missions go Jessica McKelson has seen it all in her battle to save the orang-utans in Borneo.

The primates are facing extinction as the rainforests, which are their natural habitat, are destroyed to make way for profitable palm oil plantations.

The 27-year-old Melbourne Zoo keeper makes frequent trips to work at the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Centre, the world’s largest primate rescue project.

She has rescued animals whose mouths were ripped to shreds from eating palm oil and others covered in dog bites. Still more have had limbs chopped off by bounty hunters, paid by plantation managers to provide evidence they’ve destroyed the threat to their crops.

Not long before McKelson’s first visit to the Indonesian part of Borneo, she was horrified to hear of a young female orang-utan, Poney, rescued from a brothel. Centre staff had to make three attempts to rescue Poney, who was chained to a bed.

She has been rehabilitated and returned to the wild.

“She is a wild animal again now. She has a male that tries to pursue her. Her hair’s all grown back. She’s absolutely beautiful.”

While McNelson is no longer as shocked as she was on her first trip to Borneo four years ago, one thing still gets to her — rows of cages of wild orang-utans that have come straight from the palm oil plantations to the centre.

“There’s up to 100 of them, each in a big cage, some have mothers with newborn babies.

“They should be in the forest, they are wild animals.”

The project, founded by Danish woman Lone Droscher Nielsen in 1999, has more than 600 orang-utans in its care, of which 90 per cent are orphaned.

“It’s very hard to take an infant off the mum. She’ll put up a fight to her death rather than let the infant go,” McKelson says.

Orang-utans, which share 97 per cent of our DNA, are dependent upon their mothers up until the age of nine, so many of those rescued need constant care.

The centre has a nursery where local women act as surrogate mothers to the baby orang-utans, caring for them around the clock.

“The ladies are there for them when they cry in the night, (and) they feed them. Sometimes they have nightmares from their mother’s death,” McKelson says.

One night, nine babies were brought in over a 12-hour period, and she ended up sleeping with them because they wouldn’t let her let go of them.

They are taught what to eat, what dangers to look out for and how to climb trees. Sometimes the women even break up squabbles between the infants.

After nursery, the orang-utans go to forest school one, before graduating to two once they reach the age of independence.

Eventually rehabilitated animals are put on pre-release islands, where staff still place food on feeding platforms, before they are released into the wild.

So far, 56 wild orang-utans have been released into a rainforest in the north of Central Kalimantan.

It doesn’t look good for the orang-utans, with experts saying their forest home is disappearing at such a terrifying rate they could be extinct in a decade.

But there’s plenty Australians can do — avoid buying products containing palm oil, and wood from rainforests, McKelson says.

Borneo and Sumatra are the remaining areas that are home to wild orang-utans.

But McKelson is optimistic.

Is the battle to save these primates one that can be won?

“Yes,” she says.

Breaking News from our rescue project in Borneo

Inka, the latest victim of rainforest destruction, finds sanctuary at Nyaru Menteng in the care of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation

Every time another orphan arrives at the sanctuary, we take solace in the fact that this child of the rainforest has a second chance at knowing life in the wild. And then it comes to mind of the trauma the young one has experienced, clinging to the body of its dying mother. Such is the mixture of hope and despair that we come to accept with every new arrival…

Meet the newest addition to the growing family of orangutans at the BOS rescue and rehabilitation centre – her name is Inka.

This little soul is a victim of the continuing destruction of the rainforests in Borneo. Looking into her eyes, it is difficult to comprehend such innocence suffering at the hands of humans. Her mother was killed whilst searching for food in an oil-palm plantation – often the only source of food for desperate orangutans once their natural habitat has been destroyed to meet the demand for palm oil. Orangutan babies are much in demand as pets, so Inka was sold into the illegal pet trade, where news of her plight reached Frans, one of the carers at Nyaru Menteng.

Frans was visiting his family in Bereng Jun village, when he heard about the baby orangutan, which was being kept by a local family. Frans went to visit this family, and told them about the critical situation of orangutans in the wild, how their numbers are rapidly declining, and how endangered the species is. He was successful in persuading them that Inka would have a much better life being reared by professional carers at Nyaru Menteng, and how, ultimately, she could be returned to a life in the wild, to be free once again, and to help preserve her species from extinction.

Inka is about a year to 18 months old and weighed only 5.5 lbs when she arrived at Nyaru Menteng just a few days ago. In the wild, she’d have clung to her mother nearly all the time, being shown what she could eat, what she should fear, and how to climb trees. But she is far too young to be able to survive on her own.

At Nyaru Menteng, baby Inka is cared for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by a team of babysitters, who have taken on the role of her mother. They are teaching her to recognize edible fruits and leaves in the forest, they will encourage her to climb trees, and show her how to avoid snakes and other dangerous creatures. Most of all, though, they will provide what she needs most of all – as much love as they can give her. One of the babysitters, Tris, says of Inka: “She is very small and skinny; only her teeth tell us her true age. She cries a lot at night, but this will pass. Since she came here, she has been eating a lot of fruits, and especially likes rambutans, so we hope that she will put on some weight soon. Inka also loves to climb, but she is still too tiny to join other orangutans in their play groups.”

We’re sure that it won’t be long before Inka is able to join a group of other young orangutans on their daily excursions to Forest School, and in the afternoon rough and tumble on the lawns of Nyaru Menteng.

Inka – Wrapped up warm and safe now

Photos by Rita Sastrawan (BOS International)

You can help Inka and the 800 orangutans currently being cared for by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation by donating online.

Adopting an Orangutan will also help us help them.

Borneo Orangutan Survival is dedicated to saving the orangutan from extinction and protecting its rainforest home. BOS is responsible for the rescue and rehabilitation of hundreds of wild and orphaned orangutans. Orangutan Outreach is the official fundraiser for BOS in the United States. BOS relies entirely on donations to continue our work and achieve our goal – to rehabilitate and prepare these orangutans for a life in the wild and ultimately return them to their wild rainforest home. With your help, we can show everyone that this beautiful part of the world and its red-haired inhabitants are an invaluable part of the world we share.

This is a long post– but it is incredibly valuable. Please take the time to read it… You won’t be sorry.

By Karl Amman
Visit his website to see hundreds of absolutely breathtaking photos: http://karlammann.com/

Nov. 10, 2008

I’ve just finished a film shoot, with a German television crew and a print journalist, which took us to several locations in Western and Central Kalimantan. Our objective was to investigate and document the current conservation status of orangutans indigenous to these areas.

We chartered a plane to fly from Palangkaraya to Pangkalanbun which used to be one of the strong holds of the orang utan in the Central Kalimantan region. Soon after flying over the BOS ( Borneo Orang Utan Survival Foundation) Center at Nyaru Menteng, we could clearly see where huge areas of swamp forest had recently been bulldozed for oil palm plantations with other areas having been flattened to make way for illegal gold mining . The deforestation continues all the way to Tanjung Puting National Park, then resumes along its northern border on the Kumai River.

This kind of deforestation is indicative of what is also occurring in West Kalimantan, and to some extent in the east as well. On the Malaysian side of Borneo, in Sarawak and Sabah the story appears to be the same, with many of the same companies, under Malaysian ownership and using Malaysian capital, now moving into the Indonesia side of Borneo.

I had been visiting Kalimantan on an almost annual basis since the mid 1980’s up to about 5 years ago. My favorite location for photographing the red ape, in a relatively natural setting, has been Tanjung Puting National Park. The resulting photographic coverage has been included in two titles on great apes (produced with co-authors), as well as in Orangutan Odyssey (Abrams, 1999) by Dr Birute Galdikas featuring my photography.

Eco-tourism
I had however not been back to Tanjung Puting for five years, before this opportunity arose to return, and I was shocked at how much more commercial we found it. Prices at the park’s Rimba Lodge and for boat charters have tripled since my last visit, and the orangutan feeding sites are now crowded with the “kloktok” tourist boats.

These feeding sites were originally set up to supplement ex-captive orangutans which were being re-introduced to the forest and still had to learn to forage on their own. Now, however, they appear to be provisioning adult animals as well, ones which should no longer require supplementary feeding. Thus the primary purpose of the feeding platforms now seems to be for the benefit of tourists seeking an up-close orangutan photo-op in an artificial setting complete with visitor seating areas, cordoned-off view points, and signs full of instructions and warnings – however no real information on the conservation issues affecting the orang utan populations or the new oil palm fields next door.

While eco-tourism has been touted as a panacea for many conservation projects, the number of visitors to Tanjung Puting has increased to the extent that, in my opinion, the quality of the overall experience has drastically diminished. At such a point, instead of offering a solution eco tourism often becomes part of the problem as has been seen in many of the more prominent national parks in East and Southern Africa.

On the way to Indonesia I read in an in-flight magazine a story about an orang utan rehabilitation center on Sumatra. It states; ‘ The center no longer takes in new captive orphaned orang utans as the forests around Bukit Lawang are nearly saturated with rehabilitants which is a real testament to the centers success.” I would classify filling the last patches of forests which orphaned apes as a major failure in terms of overall conservation objectives. Then no longer being able to deal with the still incoming orphans and the corresponding animal welfare as well as conservation issue, I will touch on later.

The piece concludes stating: ‘By allowing close human contact in a controlled way will not only increase the understanding and appreciation of these endangered animals but also increase the desire to protect them for future generations as well”.

If that is one of the objectives of eco tourism, in this and other parts of the world, then where is the success?

Lip Service

The Project Manager of an orangutan conservation research project in West Kalimantan informed us that Borneo’s population of red apes, 100 years ago, is estimated to have been 2 million. Today the latest census data indicates that a maximum of 50,000 remain, and these only in relic populations so fragmented that their genetic viability has become a conservation concern. This would strongly suggest that, despite the last 30 years of active conservation efforts – plus the new additions of eco tourism – and millions of dollars having been spent on trying to protect Asia’s only great ape and it’s forest habitats, nothing has worked.

A telling example of this failure, in my opinion, is the “Tanjung Puting Declaration” signed by the world’s leading primatologist in 1991, which has long been, and still is, proudly displayed in the dining room of Tanjung Puting’s Rimba Lodge. It states:

WE, THE CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS, WHO HAVE STUDIED AND WORKED TO PROTECT THE GREAT APES…
RECOGNIZE
THE EFFORTS EXPENDED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDONESIA TO PROTECT THE ORANGUTANS…
RESPECT
THE QUALITY OF NEW INDONESIAN LEGISLATION DEALING WITH ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND NATURAL PROTECTION
SUPPORT
THE SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF INDONESIAN EXPERTS…
APPRECIATE
THE SUPPORT GIVEN BY THE INDONESIAN GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS…
ACKNOWLEDGE
THE PROBLEMS FACED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDONESIA TO CONSERVE BIODIVERSITY………

The reality is, however, that more forest destruction has been taking place in Central Kalimantan than in any other ape habitat in the world. Around the time this declaration was signed Indonesia spent millions of dollars from it’s “Reforestation Fund” to clear-cut a huge tact of primary peat swamp forest in Central Kalimantan, for something called “The Rice Bowl Project” which, in the end, was never completed. Indonesia is cited today in The Guinness Book Of World Records as the biggest destroyer of primary rainforest in the world, with some estimates suggesting that forest is being lost at a rate equivalent to 300 football fields every hour. Indonesia has also become the third largest emitter of CO2 due to this clearing of primary rain forests.

During the late 90s and the early parts of this decade, I regularly documented illegal logging activities taking place along almost the entire length of the Sekonyer River, which forms the park’s western border . The park’s Probiscus research station was demolished and looted by loggers, who then used the station’s jetty as part of their riverside infrastructure. Within the park, an entire village had been constructed, complete with a mosque with shining domes.

The port of Kumai was at the time home to many active saw mills and lumber yards, where dozens of ships could be seen being loaded with illegal timber. Today, however, this activity seems largely a thing of the past, for reasons which have less to do with enforcement or conservation efforts and more with the fact that the valuable Ramin timber has been depleted, the big bucks earned. Now the raw material for Indonesia’s numerous paper mills is supplied by the clear-cutting of millions of hectares of what is now mostly secondary forest, advanced by the new kid on the block – the palm oil industry.

When I first saw reports of the “Special Palm Oil Working Group” included within the minutes of The Great Ape Alliance, I knew that things had to be bad. I did not, however, expect them to be disastrous and, possibly, already beyond hope.

Clearly, whatever the Indonesian authorities have been saying in terms of being committed to protecting Kalimantan’s forests has not resulted in any effective actions being taken on the ground. Rather, it appears to amount to little more than lip service having being paid in order to give the international community what it wants to hear. Meanwhile, the behind-the-scenes policy seems to be: the faster the remaining forests can be converted into plantations the less possibilities for descriptive international media coverage.

Orphans
The lack of political will, combined with a willingness to window-dress and deceive, is now manifestly affecting the survival of Indonesia’s few remaining wild orangutans, as well as the welfare of the approximately 1200 orphan orangutans residing in the country’s sanctuaries. It is patently obvious that these orphans would not still be coming out of the forest at these rates if any progress were being made as far as halting the forest destruction. Each orphan, in my opinion, is an advertisement of the failure of the various conservation efforts.

Besides Sumatra, Borneo’s lowland rainforest is the orangutan’s only other indigenous habitat on our planet

In the past considerable efforts were made to provide orphaned orangutans with a second chance through rescue projects offering sanctuary, rehabilitation and, ultimately, reintroduction into protected areas. (Several times, in the late 90s, I stumbled across baby orphans being illegally held in various locations in Central Kalimantan. After reporting this to the BOS Sanctuary Management in Waniraset, some were successfully confiscated and rehabilitated.)

Many of the big conservation players, having access to serious funds to apply to issues they consider conservation priorities, make the argument that the funding it takes to rehabilitate captive orphans would be better spent on protecting habitat for those remaining in the wild. In doing so, however, they overlook the fundamental fact that every orphan represents a failure on their part to protect the wild populations in the first place. Given the present situation, it seems that the flow of orphans will decline only at the rate the wild populations decline and no longer produce them.

Based on this track record should we trust these conservation conglomerates with suddenly finding an effective approach to deal with these issues.?

It seems that the concerned and educated public of the developed world has come to a general acceptance that we are unable to address the problem of uncontrolled and unsustainable development within such poorly governed countries as Indonesia. As such, one humane alternative is to focus on the plight of the orphans, even if giving them a second chance limits them to a life in semi-captivity. Therefore considerable funding has been made available to take care of great ape orphans throughout Africa as well as Indonesia and to some extent Malaysia.

As consumers of a large percentage of Indonesia’s illegally harvested timber (much of which imported as finished products from China), as well as a wide range of products containing palm oil, we, the consumers in the west as usual bear quite a bit of responsibility in arriving at this stage. Since we seem to have a problem curtailing the consumption side of it and push for better and more responsible governance in the countries concerned we feel the occasional check to adopt an orphan here or there is part of a way to make up.

In my opinion this is a mopping up exercise and has little to do with conservation but is basic animal welfare responsibility we have when it comes to our closest animal relatives. However even on this front things seem to be now changing for the worse as well.

Transparency
The media team I was traveling with wanted to film the BOS Nyaru Menteng Rescue Center where some 600 orphans are being held awaiting rehabilitation.

However, the BOS application for a filming permit entails a daunting three page list of requirements, including CV’s of all team members, health certificates, HIV tests, a full outline of script and story angle, and an explanation of how the film project will benefit BOS, “…and it’s efforts to help save orangutans”. The camera man stated that this was far in excess of what they’d had to do to film aboard a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier during The Gulf War. The print journalist (who was also a producer) asked if he could visit without the film crew, but was told that he would have to submit an outline and “story board” of his intended piece. This he considered “totally absurd” and the worst form of censorship he had ever encountered.

After making a few phone calls, we established that the board of BOS is now comprised mostly of ex-government officials doing the bidding for the authorities. The result being a media access policy structured in such a way as to allow to exclude any proposals not portraying happy endings and an overall positive slant.

Apparently this has been deemed necessary based on the fact that media teams have regularly used the orangutan’s plight as a vehicle to telling the wider story of unsustainable development and forest destruction combined with the drastic increase in CO2 emission. Thus the powers that be, seeking to curtail this kind of exposure, and seemingly in collaboration with the palm oil industry lobby groups, have come up with demands for documentation which will allow them to in turn use this red tape to control future media coverage.

2015
Unwilling to accept these censorship rules, we abandoned our plans to visit the BOS rescue center. Rather than pursuing the story of rescued orphans, we decided to focus instead on the story behind those orphans still awaiting rescue. In the West Kalimantan town of Ketapang we found five young orangutans awaiting transfer to one of the official rescue centers, in solitary confinement within dark cages, to which they had already been confined for four months. Local forestry officials told us that the sanctuaries were now considered full and this was the first time they had encountered such a delay in transferring confiscated orphans.

Also in Ketapang we were told, by a representative of a foreign conservation NGO, that they had submitted a list of 20 illegally held orangutans to Forestry officials with the hope of having them confiscated. They too confirmed that, because no sanctuary space was available, further confiscations were deemed pointless. A local conservationist who later tried to locate the orphans on that list told us that most had already “disappeared”… It seems this is now the latest approach to ‘solving the problem’ of illegally held orphans.

In Pontianak we visited two adult orang utans held illegally in small cages in a garbage area of a residential estate. They have been there for years and as usual with adult animals they are much harder to confiscate and relocate then small orphans. After a recent escape their cages have now been welded closed. The message again seems to be they will never again leave these cages. Our local guides estimated that there are between 50-100 illegally held orang utans in Pontianak alone.

“The Strategic Plan” for the conservation of the remaining orangutan populations, which was presented by Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the 2007 Bali Conference, embedded within a wide range of lofty goals and declarations, makes it clear that Indonesia’s target is for all orangutan rescue and rehabilitation centers to be closed by 2015. Many of the world’s largest conservation organizations have signed on to this plan and are cited on its title page.

The conclusion has to be that sanctuaries which are expected to close down in seven years will have their hands more than full to find new forest patches for rehabilitation and then getting the 1200 orphans now awaiting relocation back into a natural setting and as such it should not be surprising that a bottleneck concerning new arrivals is developing. However confiscation relocation represented about the only aspect of any kind of effective law enforcement in the context of orang utan protection there ever was. No longer accepting orphans and no longer confiscating any means officially ignoring the law of the land (an orang utan can only be legally held with a specific authorization of The President of the Republic of Indonesia) and sending a loud and clear message: The Orang Utans have become too inconvenient.

Trading of Orang Utans and Conservation

In 2006 the CITES Secretariat and the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP) mounted a joint mission to determine why large numbers of orangutans were being illegally exported and turning up elsewhere in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. One point the corresponding report makes is that there has never, in the history of independent Indonesia, been a successful prosecution of any poacher having killed an orang utan or anybody for illegally holding one. Clearly this lack of political will in enforcing national laws protecting endangered species is hardly conducive to productive conservation efforts. Indeed, the CITES/GRASP answer to the problem of orphan orangutans was: to ship them to foreign zoos or euthanasia. The UN body specially established to protect the last remaining great apes concludes that in case of the orang utan there is little hope and potentially a dead orang utan is the best solution.

I fail to understand the logic behind the message which conservation NGO’s attempt to convey to local villagers, that wild orangutans in the forest comprise a valuable resource, while illegally held orphans (captured after their mothers have been illegally killed) no longer have any kind of value – they are classified as already genetically dead.. At least the occasional confiscation in the past, served as a reminder of the government’s official stance regarding law enforcement and wildlife protection.

The future

On the ground in Kalimantan, the situation appears hopeless. In the larger economic scheme of things, the orangutan now seems to amount to little more than an inconvenient nuisance, the sooner gone the better. The facts are:

- orphans are still appearing in numbers
- it has become close to impossible to film or photograph the large numbers of apes now held at ‘rescue centers
- recently confiscated orphans are stuck in half way houses
- no more confiscations seem to be taking place
- the government has decided that all sanctuaries and rehabilitation centers need to be closed by 2015

Clearly, the efforts of both the conservation and now the animal welfare establishments have failed and are failing. While millions of hectares of Indonesia’s secondary lowland forests are being replaced by palm oil plantations, no new areas are being allocated for the rescue and rehabilitation of the hundreds of homeless orangutans. Apparently the conservation community wields no real clout on any level. The sooner we accept the fact that whatever the past approach was (Tanjung Putting, Kinshasa declaration etc.) has failed and that unless something drastically changes all the efforts of the past will amount to having lost ‘by one less goal’.

It appears that the orangutans of Indonesia will be the first of the great ape populations to go extinct in the wild with a few, genetically no longer viable, relic populations hanging on in some forest patches. The projections of experts of this occurring within the next 20 years might, in fact, be overly optimistic. It is no longer a subjective question of seeing the glass half full or half empty – it is obvious that the glass is indeed empty, of all but the last few drops.

This post comes from our friends at the Great Orangutan Project, home to our idol: Aman the orangutan.

Check out their blog.

For the last few years, The Great Orangutan Project has focused its activities in Borneo, but on the Malaysian side on the island. The reason has been simple, the environmental laws are enforced relatively well which means that protected orangutans have a far better chance of survival.

Just across the border, in Indonesia, the destruction has continued unabated meanwhile. The terms “corruption, collusion and nepotism” are famous in Indonesian society, and for a very good reason, because they are rife. I heard recently a statistic that 70% of protected national parks have been illegally logged, and it would seem that this is done with the collaboration of the army. A sad state of affairs and a deeply depressing one.

Against this backdrop, many conservation charities have been working hard to rescue orangutans that have been the victims of this habitat destruction, and black market for pets, in Indonesia. They have done a fantastic job but without backing from the local Government it has been a losing battle. Indonesia is a vast area of land divided into thousands of islands. It is not easy to manage such a country and so power is devolved, which means that each province has its own Government, like the United States of America that is divided into States. Each province has its own powers, the a lot of flexibility to ignore laws from the main Government in Jakarta. Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, is particular rife with corruption which has made the task of conservation extremely difficult.

With all this in mind, The Great Orangutan Project has decided to get involved in a very difficult situation. By staying out of Indonesia we will not be able to make any change. Only together can we overcome the corrupt and illegal practices that turn most Indonesians’ stomachs. We are now looking for volunteer projects in Indonesia and we hope to start something in 2009.

There is hope. Attention is focused on Indonesia. It is widely recognised that Indonesia is the world’s 3rd worst polluter for greenhouse gases (after the USA and China) because of deforestation and forest fires. Many people are pressurising the Indonesia Government and Provincial authorities. The Indonesians voted for a president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2004. He vowed to tackle corruption that has plagued Indonesia for years. So far he has had some notable successes and the head of the police has arrested hundreds of illegal loggers, including some big names. The destruction is not over yet, but there is hope and The Great Orangutan Project thinks this is a good time to make a move. Stayed tuned, there may soon be a way for you to volunteer and make a difference for the orangutans in the heart of the destruction.

By Jerry Guo Nov 6th 2008
Source: Gadling.com

Welcome to Catching the Travel Bug, Gadling’s mini-series on getting sick on the road, prevailing and loving travel throughout. Five of our bloggers will be telling their stories from around the globe for the next five weeks. Submit your best story about catching the travel bug in the comments and we’ll publish our favorite few at the end of the series.

The swamp here could be the stuff of nightmares. Because this happens to be the rainy season, which lasts from October to March, the trails are meant to be waded, not walked. Yet I am utterly stuck, knee-deep in pungent red mud with stagnant water up to my waist. Ellen Meulman, a PhD student from the University of Zurich, doubles back to pull me out of the quagmire. It takes a few hard yanks. “Be careful,” she says. “You can disappear in these waters.” Thoughts of leeches and king cobras vanish, replaced by a more immediate fear.

We’ve been slogging and hacking through the Sumatran jungle for nearly three hours, on our way to rendezvous with today’s observation team. The field staff hustles day in and out to arrive at the nest-site before dawn and do not return until after dark. In between, they track the individual behaviors of the orangutan in excruciating detail.

But for now, I’m too busy worrying about myself. Asides from the immediate danger of disappearing into the quicksand-like mud and trying to balance on a crude plank trail that’s submerged in water, I’m being absolutely devoured by mosquitos. Before embarking on this afternoon trek through the jungle, I dumped half a bottle of herbal mosquito repellent all over my body, but that has made no difference. At one point, the constant biting and buzzing and circling drive me nearly to tears. Alas I’m too tired to cry.

That night, after returning to camp and getting deleeched (a complicated process that involved me screeching in a high pitch voice, “get them off; get them off”, to my driver), I noticed a patch of mosquito bites around my ankle. I started scratching them and soon enough, a half dozen bumps turned into a dozen.

My flight back to the states was set to depart in a couple days, and this swamp was something like 1,000 miles away from Jakarta airport. So I had to leave the very next day, up a winding river and then through the heart of Sumatra on a 10-hour overnight drive back to Medan. From there, I flew to Jakarta and left right away for New York.

Here the story stalls for about a week. I kept scratching my bites and they kept festering and oozing and doing all the other nasty stuff that I’ll just leave to your imagination. What was somewhat worrisome at this point was that these bites weren’t getting any less itchy–and keep in mind that a week has passed by now. Even worse, they started melding together into a few superbumps.

Then all of a sudden, I started walking with a limp. I immediately thought of the worst case scenario: I had contracted some type of flesh eating bacteria (and made the mistake of Googling the images … don’t). I ran down to my school’s health services, where something happened that you never, ever want to happen in a doctor’s office, which is to have the doctor say “hmm, that’s interesting.” He subsequently disappeared, and a few minutes later, came back with three or four of his colleagues. They proceeded to collectively give a “hmm, that’s interesting”. I could see the pity in their eyes. The end was going to come in only a matter of days.

And being the unlucky guy I was, this happened on a Friday afternoon. The nurses and doctors had no idea what I had, although they feared it was contagious. So they basically held me prisoner as an inpatient for the entire weekend. The following Monday, a dermatologist came to see me and declared that I had a “hypoallergic” reaction to the mosquitoes, which is to say that my immune system just went berserk from the utter number of bites I received.

Two weeks of heavy-duty antibiotics and a course of cortisteroids later, the scary rash that was climbing up my leg had abated. Looking back, would I have trekked out there if I knew that it would land me in the emergency room for the better part of a week? Probably!

Yo see, the orangutans in this part of Sumatra are pretty damn special. They’ve learned some remarkable tricks, such as how to fashion a seed-extraction stick to crack open the prickly shell of the Neesia fruit. The theory goes that this rather complicated skill developed from simpler abilities to use tools to dig for honey, fish for termites, and scoop for water. Yet primatologists know little more than that these smarter-than-we-thought apes possess culture; the pressing question now is to figure out how it’s acquired and transferred.

Though outsiders often refer to this swamp as “orangutan heaven but human hell,” the staff does not plan to jump ship anytime soon. They want to bring the station back to its old glory by this fall, with an new 6-room dormitory, solar panels for constant electricity, and three boardwalks (getting to the orangutans without them can take several hours). They’re even hiring-the graduate students need at least five more assistants to juggle the array of projects.

Since fieldwork stopped across Aceh, it’s difficult to precisely quantify the impact of the civil war on this biodiversity hotspot, home to elephants, rhinoceroses, leopards, sun bears, tigers, and some 6,500 orangutans. While the primatologists at Suaq lost much more time than their neighbors-eight years of data-the 70 or so test subjects haven’t missed a beat. In fact, the concentration of orangutans here, where fruits rain from the trees year-round, is greater than anywhere else in the world (twice the density of other sites on Sumatra and five times the density on Borneo, the only other island where these apes can be found). The unusually high density has enabled these solitary creatures to “teach” each other skills like tool-use, making Suaq the ideal laboratory for studying the origins of human culture.

But for now, Suaq is still a friendly neighborhood. I still distinctly remember the afternoon that I finally spot two of the residents: the mellow Lisa and her 6-year-old daughter, Lilly. Lisa, ambling in the treetops, much prefered her sour melaka fruits to our company. But for a brief moment, Lilly swung down to investigate these strange-looking two-legged apes, and realizing we would not make suitable playmates, disappeared in a blur of orange.

This brief encounter with one of the world’s most intelligent and beautiful creatures was worth dealing with the travel bug.

PRI International — Correspondent for The World Anna Sussman reports that the rush for environmentally friendly fuel there is having a devastating effect on the island’s endangered primates.

Listen to Park Ranger Darma Bodi Pinem and the Center for Orangutan Protection’s Hardi Baktiantoro describe the effect of palm oil on orangutan habitat.

Listen here: http://www.theworld.org/taxonomy_by_date/3/20081027

This beautiful baby orangutan was rescued by the Center for Orangutan Protection (COP) team.

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