I’m a volunteer/docent at Miami Metrozoo and have teamed up with Orangutan Outreach to spread the word to other volunteer/docent groups around the world to join us in a very special international Mother’s Day campaign focusing on the plight of orphaned orangutans.

At Metrozoo, our volunteer/docent group will be hosting this special day in which we will set up tables full of fun facts, biofacts and interactives for our visitors. Your own Mother’s Day event can be as simple as one table hosted by one volunteer to a full blown awareness day. I can provide easy to print PDF files with posters, info sheets, and brochures to help with your event.

Why Mother’s Day?

What better way than on Mother’s Day to celebrate one of Earth’s best mothers? Orangutan mothers and babies have a very close relationship and have the longest childhood of all the great apes - up to 8 years. As solitary animals, they don’t have a troop around to give them the many lessons of finding fruit, building nests and other survival techniques. The mother teaches them everything about survival in the forest before they set out on their own.

Orangutans only give birth about once every 8 years and have just 4 to 5 babies in a lifetime. This is why orangutan populations are very slow to recover from disturbance.Sadly, many orangutan mothers are killed every year in Indonesia so that their babies can be sold illegally as pets. Many mothers are killed as their rainforest homes are destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations leaving hundreds of helpless orphans. The Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Center is currently home to nearly 650 orphaned orangutans. Nyaru Menteng, along with it’s manager Lone Droscher Nielsen, has been featured on Animal Planet’s series “Orangutan Island’. Those orangutans need our help!

It’s hard to believe, but estimates are that orangutans may have as little as 10 years left before their extinction in the wild. Mother’s Day is the perfect day to bring awareness to the plight of these beautiful red haired apes and to, hopefully, encourage people to want to help protect them.

If you’d like to participate in this special day, please email me at hollyweb@bellsouth.net and I can add your zoo to a list of participating institutions to be posted on the Orangutan Outreach website.

If there is a better contact, please forward this email or, perhaps, send me a contact name and email address for the right person at your zoo - your volunteer co-ordinator, volunteer/docent organization officers or members, orangutan lovers - whomever you think would be the most interested in participating in this very special international Mother’s Day event.

Hope you’ll join us,

Holly Draluck

Volunteer/Docent
Zoological Society of Florida
Miami Metrozoo