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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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A review of the 36-minute documentary by Hilary Chiew and Chi Too

Watch the film online

What Environment? It’s occupation and terrorism.

I watched What Rainforest? and immediately felt that it should not be called an ‘environmental’ documentary. But it was conveniently lumped under environment at its debut showing at the 2008 Freedom Film Festival recently.

As environmental issues become mainstream, its messages becomes simplified and stereotyped…. and boring. Add the indigenous people, and the Hollywood theme of Guardian of the Rainforest gets even more tiresome.

Here goes – Primitive but wise with the way of the jungle, the indigenous people fight a losing battle against modern development to protect their way of life and identity. How heroic. How sad.

I think it’s time to move on. Because if you sing this refrain over and over, people stop caring. And it gives ammunition to those who don’t give two hoots about the environment or native rights to respond: Hey, wake up man. We have to develop. We have hungry stomachs to fill. Why should we be sorry for cutting down a few trees?

The West finished cutting their trees and now wants to stop us?! And those lazy natives, why are you so anti-development? You want to be uneducated, poor and hungry ah? (as if they were offered any choices).

That’s the typical answer politicians in Sarawak love to give when you present them facts about illegal logging. Nevermind the criminal element of illegal logging, they will bring out that tiresome narrative about development vs environment.

The 36-minute documentary What Rainforest? by Chi Too and Hilary Chiew is a different sort of film with an environmental sounding name. It made me sit up. It made me burn. It’s not about development vs environment with pretty pictures of virgin rainforests and its cute denizens thrown in.

Palestine-like

It’s really about occupation and terrorism. Much akin to what the Palestinians are facing in their homeland. Driven out of their land and occupied by others while the rest of the world looks on.

Except that in this case, it is perpetuated not by foreign enemies but done with the aggressive support of the state using our tax dollars backed by dubious sections of the law. So in effect, it’s state terrorism.

Ok, I’d say the Palestinians have it much worse, but the fact of the matter is that occupation and terrorism is happening in the Land of the Hornbills. Occupation – people’s land are being occupied illegally. Terrorism – people are being threatened and even beaten if they refuse to leave, if they put up blockades, or if they’re organising their people. There have also been cases of mysterious disappearances and deaths of activists. Recently, NGO’s have claimed that Penan women and girls were raped and sexually abused by loggers. All these are part of the terrorism tactics to cow a people into submission and to abandon their claim of the land.

If the same events were to be transplanted into Peninsular Malaysia middle-class life, there would be lawsuits, and rolling heads. No, it wouldn’t even happen to begin with. If it did, the closest thing that can bring that kind of outrage is the demolition of places of worship. It would bring no less than a Hindraf Makkal Sakti kind of respond.

When handbags get snatched, when houses get burglarised, especially when it’s a politician’s wife and a minister’s house, they get frontpaged. When someone’s land in Sarawak is being grabbed in broad daylight, and the owners terrorised by gangsters and police stand and watch, it’s either too sensitive or too complicating to report. Let me just put it simply.

Licence to log

Imagine someone coming into your house and cart all your furniture out. Then, they put their own furniture inside your house and tell you, get out, this house belongs to us now. You go to the police. They do nothing. Ok now, put yourself in the native’s shoes, or bare feet. Those bulldozers and loggers come, and they plunder your trees – trees that give shade, wood and fronds to build homes, herbs and roots for medicine, trees that shelter animals so you can hunt them for food, and strong roots to keep soil in place so you have water to drink and wash from clean rivers– in short, everything you need to survive. No need to venture into global warming talk or critters at the brink of extinction.

The greedy loggers don’t care about any of that. They show you their licence to log with Sarawak chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud’s signature on it and laugh in your face. They send their gangsters to intimidate you if you try to fight back. And while you’re slogging out in court moving at a snail’s pace to prove that the land belongs to you because your ancestors were there first, they flout court decrees and start logging anyway.

Before the judge can postpone the next trial date, they start planting palm oil. Then they claim the land is theirs because instead of leaving the land ‘idle’, they cultivate it. Next they apply ownership papers to justify it.

What do you do? You’d better start planting palm oil before they come. Forget about your old life of living in harmony with nature. Forget about your cultural identity and traditional way of life, and most of all, the environment. Log the trees, sell the timber and with the money, plant oil palm. Lots of them. Then you can prove that the land is yours. Beat the greedy companies in their own game ha ha. That’s what the last man standing did, Segan anak Degon. Hmm, tidak Segan sama sekali, brave man. Hell, that’s what I’ll do if I were in his place.

Watch What Rainforest? online

(Note to future film fest organisers keen on showing this film: This film should be put under the category: Occupation and Terrorism and shown with other films of this nature, such as the Palestinian conflict, and the War against Terrorism. Not under Environment.)

Source: http://whatrainforest.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/occupation-and-terrorism-at-home/

BOS Nyaru Menteng Clinic — Everyone who sets foot in the BOS Nyaru Menteng Clinic is puzzled by the behavior of Randang and Bonita. The same question always comes to mind. People simply assume that the two orangutans are mother and child.

But it’s not only people who seem to think this way. Bonita, a six-year-old female orangutan, is clearly attached to Randang, a small female orangutan aged around two to two-and-a-half years who hangs on to Bonita as though seeking protection from her own mother. This has been happening on for around two months. Almost every day the two are always together and don’t want to be separated. Randang always climbs onto Bonita’s back as though she is her mother.

This story began about 2 months ago, when Randang and Bonita were both in the same group at the playground clinic. This area is for orangutans from Forest School who are recovering from illness, were recently rescued, or are in the process of having their regular health exams.

Previously, Bonita had been on the transitional forest island Pallas II (known to millions of television viewers as ‘Orangutan Island’, but last year when she fell seriously ill, she was taken off the island and brought back to the Nyaru Menteng clinic for treatment. She is still recovering.

Randang was confiscated from the KSDA (forestry) office of the village of Timpah, which is in the Kapuas Province in Central Kalimantan, on the 26th of June 2007 when she was between one-and-a-half and two years old. According to her ex-owner, Randang hadn’t been in captivity long and she was not used to being around people. This meant that Randang had to be placed in the playground clinic, as she was too wild to be able to join the Forest School.

When she first arrived at the playground clinic, Randang certainly looked scared and tended to seek protection from larger orangutans, one of whom was Bonita– who often let Randang climb onto her.

At first Bonita seemed indifferent to Randang’s habit, mostly because there were many other orangutans the same age as Bonita who she could play with in the playground clinic. Bonita didn’t try to follow or approach Randang. However, two months later, all of the other orangutans had recovered and only Bonita and Randang were left.

From that day onward, the two were always together. Wherever Bonita went, Randang always followed, holding onto her fur in the same way as a baby orangutan hangs on to his or her mother. Furthermore, Bonita could also be seen hugging Randang in the same way as a mother orangutan protects her child.

Interestingly, Bonita is only six years old and obviously hasn’t had any of her own children, but now she looks after Randang the same way as an orangutan mother would. Randang acts the same way any baby orangutan would with his or her mother: She often hangs from Bonita. When you see Randang suckle from Bonita, Bonita just sits quietly as though suckling her own child.

To see two orangutans who love each other so much is a very heart-warming scene. According to Dr. Siska, it will be very difficult to separate the two now– especially when Bonita (who is still undergoing her treatment) must be separated from Randang to have her medicine.

It is not just Randang who hangs on to Bonita; often, if Randang is far away, Bonita will try to come closer.

Once Bonita is healthy again the two will be separated because Bonita must return to the transitional forest island, Pallas II (Orangutan Island). But for now, Bonita & Randang are still together in the playground clinic at BOS Nyaru Menteng.

Translated by Kylie Montgomery
Edited by Martyn Dalby & Mich Rangitutia & Richard Zimmerman

Dr Willie Smits is on a mission to save the endangered orangutan. It’s a straight vine from its survival to ours.

By Kenneth Miller
Photos by Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle, published by H. F. Ullmann

The seaside marketplace was crowded with women in sarongs and headcloths, haggling over piles of tropical fruit and dried fish. But a much rarer commodity caught Willie Smits’s attention one humid day on the island of Borneo. “Good morning, mister,” a vendor called out, thrusting a wooden cage into the biologist’s face.

“In between the slats, I saw these horribly sad eyes,” Smits recalls. They belonged to a young orangutan, her body emaciated and her features slack with misery. Though Smits ran a forestry research station on the island’s east coast, he had never come face-to-face with one of the creatures. As he moved on, he couldn’t shake the feeling that a red-haired child, ill and abused, needed his help.

Baby orangutan, Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle

“If you look into the eyes of an orangutan,” says Smits, “you are looking into the soul of a person.”
That night, he returned to look for her. He found the little orangutan dying of dehydration on a garbage heap, where the vendor had tossed her after failing to find a buyer. Back home, he spent 24 hours feeding her diluted milk and cradling her in his lap. When she was out of danger, Smits named her Uce (pronounced “oo-cheh”), for the gasping sounds she’d been making when he rescued her.

Two decades later, Smits, 51, has saved more than 1,600 orangutans, gentle and highly intelligent great apes now classified as an endangered species. They’re threatened by smugglers who capture them for the black-market pet trade in Indonesia and abroad, by diners who consider orangutan meat a delicacy, by shopkeepers who sell the animals’ skulls as souvenirs, and by loggers who are decimating their jungle habitat. Smits’s organization, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), takes in orphaned or displaced animals and resettles them in protected rain forests. This month he will release 96 orangutans—his biggest graduating class yet.

One thing Smits’s work has taught him is that our fate is inextricably tied to the orangutans’. Certain varieties of wood sold at American lumberyards are illegally harvested from the animals’ home turf; the vegetable oil in many processed foods comes from palm trees planted where jungle once grew. The razing of the forests, in turn, contributes to global warming and thus to droughts, floods, and other disasters from Alaska to Australia.

“Protecting orangutans,” Smits tells anyone who will listen, “is the same as protecting people.”

Orangutans are our closest evolutionary cousins after bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, sharing 97 percent of their DNA with humans, and they’re like us in many other ways. They make tools, using sticks to crack open fruits. They can be taught to understand hundreds of human words. Children live with their mothers for eight years, learning to navigate the jungle and distinguish between harmful and useful plants. Babies like to be tickled, reacting with silent laughter.

But orangutans are far less adaptable than humans. The largest of all arboreal mammals, they need vast, unbroken stretches of forest to survive in the wild. An orangutan spends its days foraging in the branches for food. When the trees go, so do the tree dwellers.

Once found throughout Southeast Asia, orangutans are now confined to isolated areas of Borneo (whose land mass is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A century ago, their estimated population was 315,000; today, 50,000 remain.

The son of a farm laborer from the Netherlands, Smits showed an affinity for animals early on. “I ran away from home when I was one and a half, and they found me sleeping on the belly of the meanest guard dog in the neighborhood,” he says from Washington, D.C., where he’s visiting from Borneo to lobby the World Bank for funds. He planned to study veterinary medicine in college but found the classes dull. Wandering into a lecture on tropical forestry, he was hooked.

Smits went on to earn a doctorate in the subject. He traveled to Indonesia for graduate work in 1980 and soon settled there, marrying a princess from a tribe in Sulawesi; he and his wife have three sons. He also established a reputation as a brilliant ecologist, developing highly regarded rain forest conservation techniques.

Then the orangutans came calling.

In the fall of 1989, two weeks after Smits saved Uce, he got a message from an employee of the Indonesian forest ministry. The man had heard about the rescue and wondered if Smits would take in another ailing orangutan—a young male who’d been found in the jungle after his mother was killed. Forestry workers had named him Dodoy. Smits nursed him back to health, intending to send both orphans to a rehabilitation center.

But such programs, Smits learned, had problems. Most of them released rescued apes as soon as possible. The animals often clashed over territory with their wild counterparts, infected them with human diseases, or simply starved. Some experts called for a new strategy: Quarantine the rescuees and treat them for contagious illnesses, teach them the skills they need to survive in the wild, and release them in a patch of protected jungle with no existing orangutan population.

Smits with his charges at one of his rehab centers, Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle

Orange crush: Smits with his charges at one of his rehab centers.
Using those principles, Smits decided to start his own rehab center. After numerous corporations, nonprofits, and the Dutch and Indonesian governments turned him down for funding, he brought Uce and Dodoy to an assembly at the international school his children attended. The faculty and students embraced Smits’s vision—”Willie could sell salt to the sea,” says Peter Karsono, an Indonesian teacher who later helped run BOS-and launched a fund-raising campaign. The students collected $5,000 through bake sales, sponsored walks, and appeals to their often wealthy parents. After an oil executive matched that sum, Smits had the seed money he needed.

Next he had to convince local villagers, most of whom belonged to Borneo’s Dayak tribe, that protecting orangutans was better than killing them for their meat and skulls.

Smits traveled deep into Borneo’s backcountry, where rivers were the only roads. Entering one tribal longhouse, he found a baby orangutan cowering near the half-eaten carcass of its mother. “How can you do this?” Smits shouted in the local dialect.

As the warriors reached for their blowpipes, Smits realized he’d made a potentially dangerous blunder. He switched tactics.

“Do you like lahung?” he asked, referring to a jungle fruit.

The Dayaks nodded. He listed several other indigenous fruits and asked if he could buy seedlings.

“They’re very rare,” a tribesman said, explaining—as Smits knew—that the seeds of many native plants would sprout only after passing through an orangutan’s digestive tract.

“So do you think your children will be able to keep eating these good things,” Smits asked, “if you kill all the orangutans?”

There was a pause. “I stopped hunting them,” one man suddenly declared, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I shot at one and thought I’d missed. When she came down, I thought she was going to attack me. Instead she laid her baby at my feet and fell dead. After that, I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Others chimed in with stories of encounters with friendly orangutans. Smits shook hands with his new allies. Then he climbed into his motorboat and took his sales pitch to the next town.

The Wanariset rehabilitation center opened in 1991, staffed mostly by Dayaks. Soon they were caring for dozens of orangutans, many turned in by sympathetic locals. Smits expanded his mission, pressuring the Indonesian government to crack down on the illegal pet trade and helping officials track down smuggled orangutans. He was eventually named adviser to the minister of forestry.

But he faced monumental resistance as well. Owners of domesticated orangutans—who often give the animals candy and cigarettes and cage them when they grow too big—protested the rescue effort. Some spat at Smits when he arrived with the authorities to confiscate their pets. He received hundreds of anonymous death threats. His house was burned down, his dog killed. His wife fled with their sons to her hometown on the island of Sulawesi, where she was elected deputy mayor. (His wife and oldest son still live there, and Smits sees them as often as his work allows.)

Orangutans being retrained for the wild, Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle

Survival strategy: As part of their retraining for the wild, orangutans are taught to eat high above the ground to avoid predators.
Despite his dedication, Smits’s work was doing little to slow the decline in the orangutan population. Illegal logging had increased, the palm oil business was booming, and the two often worked hand in hand. After loggers cleared a swath of jungle, growers would burn the stubble to make way for palm plantations. “Hundreds of orangutans were coming out of the forest, burning alive,” Smits recalls.

The deforestation brought flooding and water pollution to many Dayak villages. The carbon dioxide released by the vanishing jungle made Indonesia the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. And as the planet warmed, Borneo’s remaining forests sickened. In the past, great flowering cycles took place every four years, spreading a bonanza of seeds. The last one occurred nine years ago.

Smits opened a second rehab center, in southern Borneo, but he realized that saving individual orangutans wasn’t enough. So in 2003 he launched his boldest project yet: growing a new rain forest, designed as a refuge for orangutans and a model for a new kind of human community. He chose the wasteland surrounding the town of Samboja, where ground once shaded by jungle was now carpeted with alang-alang—a wild grass that emits cyanide, preventing trees from growing. The wildlife had disappeared, and the few people left were mired in poverty and disease.

BOS bought 5,000 acres and hired local workers to clear away the grass and plant a million trees. Samboja Lestari—”Samboja Forever,” in the local dialect—was designed as concentric circles. In the middle is a nearly mature forest, home to a growing number of rescued orangutans. On the periphery are plots where 650 human families can grow fruit and sugar palms, the sap of which will be sold for use in sweeteners and bio-fuels. (Unlike oil palms, sugar palms thrive alongside native plants.) Samboja Lestari is also the site of a lodge for ecotourists and a satellite transponder station serving the European Space Agency, both of which help pay the project’s expenses.

Residents of the area earn wages doing reforestation work, send their children to a BOS-run school, and get free building materials if they choose to live on their plots. In return, they’re responsible for policing themselves: If anyone is caught harming an orangutan or a tree, his neighbors must decide the penalty. So far, there have been no transgressions.

Outside the perimeter, “we’re working very hard,” Smits says, “but we’re not solving the problem.”

When he grows weary, it helps to hike into the forest where he released Uce in 1992. She lives there with her youngest male offspring, Matahari, whose father is Dodoy, Smits’s second rescuee. (An older male, Bintang, has grown up and left the nest.) When Smits calls Uce’s name, she clambers down from the treetops. “She hands me her baby and hugs me,” he says.

Smits recently shot a video of mother and child playing on the forest floor. Though orangutans can’t speak, they communicate eloquently by other means. In the film, Uce stops for a moment and looks up at her human friend. Her smile is broad and warm, and that tells Smits everything he needs to know.

LEARN MORE

-Borneo has 45,000 orangutans, down from 60,000 in 1996. Sumatra has 5,000, half the ‘96 number.

-Borneo’s 287,000 square miles were once almost entirely rain forest; now half are.

-For every orangutan captured for the pet trade, five die in the process.

-The population shrinks by 6,000 per year, and the animals could be extinct by 2020.