Orangutans make for fascinating viewing
10/28/07
By Anne Louise Bannon
Source: Portland Press Herald - Maine Sunday Telegram
[...] A new nature series from Animal Planet that is a lot more hopeful: “Orangutan Island,” premiering Friday at 9 p.m. As we all know, orangutans, the orange apes of Borneo, are highly endangered, thanks to habitat loss and poaching.
The show is premiering after the “Meerkat Manor” season finale, and will take the meerkat’s 8:30 p.m. time slot starting Nov. 9. It’s also not unlike “Meerkat Manor” in style. The apes all have names and personalities — we’re focusing on a few of them, as opposed to the whole tribe that will eventually inhabit one of three islands.
But this is a different project altogether. While “Meerkat Manor” is based on a research project and human contact is generally avoided, “Orangutan Island” focuses on orangutans who have been orphaned and raised with humans at a rescue center run by naturalist Lone Droscher-Nielsen. In an effort to help the orangutans survive, the project releases them on three islands that should be safe from the logging that has been devastating Borneo’s forests, and instead of encouraging them to become the solitary nomads orangutan’s normally are, the project encourages the apes to form communities.
I really like this show on several levels. Of course, the conservation theme is critical, and hopefully, Droscher-Nielsen’s work will encourage kids to start thinking along the lines of working as naturalists. But given the personalities of the individual apes and how they behave around each other, there are also some very interesting parallels to our human families and how we interact with each other.
There’s a lot of wealth to be mined here. Cha Cha has a hard time adjusting, at first, to being left on the island. She’s an affectionate animal and has bonded with Drosher-Nielsen. And she gets pretty depressed at first. What a perfect opportunity to talk about scary feelings with your preschooler who’s having a hard time adjusting to being in school. Or maybe to help another child develop some empathy for a frightened younger sibling.
And that’s only the beginning. The challenge is to let everything unfold naturally.
