Update on Temara the Sumatran Orangutan from Perth Zoo
A NEW logging road will threaten the back yard of the only Australian zoo-born orangutan released into the Indonesian wilderness, environmentalists warn.
Conservation groups fear the 20m-wide thoroughfare cutting a swath through the landscape south of Bukit Tigapuluh national park in Sumatra signals the beginning of the end for most of the thick forest landscape.
Only a third of the 450,000ha forest block is protected as national park, home to the only Australian zoo-born Sumatran orangutan to be released into the wild.
In 2006 Temara, now 15, of Perth Zoo, became the first zoo-bred Sumatran orangutan ever placed in her natural habitat.
The concerns came as another group said one of Borneo’s biggest wild orangutan populations would be extinct in three years without drastic measures to end palm oil plantation expansion.
Source: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23662337-663,00.html
