An Open Door, a Forest ...

BUKIT TIGAPULUH NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia -- Mustafa crawled slowly out of the metal cage and found himself in the middle of the Sumatran jungle. He had been behind bars for a dozen years. Now he was home.

He hesitated for a moment, then scampered up the nearest tree. In quick order, he swung on a vine, fed on termites from a rotting tree and built a sleeping nest 60 feet above ground.

For Peter Pratje, a German wildlife biologist who led an expedition into the jungle to release Mustafa, the adult orangutan’s behavior offered hope that he could survive on his own despite his inexperience in the wild.

“It’s like a prisoner being released and going to Disneyland to try every ride,” Pratje said. “What we saw was very promising. He really looks like a wild orangutan, even if he hasn’t seen the forest for 12 years.”

Pratje, project leader of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, plans to free as many as 50 rehabilitated orangutans in Bukit Tigapuluh National Park in central Sumatra, where the species has not lived for 150 years. He hopes to help save the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan and a fragment of the island’s rapidly dwindling rain forest.

The orangutans -- orphans illegally captured in the wild, sold as pets and later seized by authorities -- are learning to live in an environment they haven’t known since they were small.

Mustafa, the largest of the 35 freed so far, stands a good chance of becoming the group’s alpha male. He is believed to already have fathered two babies through the bars of his cage while awaiting release at the Orangutan Reintroduction Center on the edge of the park.

Estimated to be 15 years old, he seems good-natured but is potentially the most dangerous because of his size. In an attempt to release him far from humans, eight men carried his cage on poles for a day through the leech-infested jungle, then ferried him by bamboo raft upriver to a remote part of the park.

“Given the choice of life imprisonment or being dropped in the forest, which would you choose?” Pratje asked. “At the least, he can die in the forest like a real orangutan.”

The orangutan, an arboreal species with arms longer than its legs, is in the family of great apes, along with the chimpanzee and gorilla. Highly intelligent, its close-set eyes and facial expressions make it look eerily human. In Indonesia, the creatures are called orang utan, people of the forest. They can live to 35 in the wild.

Although they have a body weight comparable to that of humans, orangutans can be four times stronger. Pratje, who was once attacked by a slightly smaller orangutan, calculates that at 140 pounds, Mustafa is twice as strong as Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Separate species of orangutan live on Sumatra and neighboring Borneo, two of the world’s largest islands. The Sumatran, distinguished by its reddish color, is one of the world’s most endangered primates, with only 7,500 remaining. On Borneo, about 35,000 orangutans are left.

The biggest threat to both species is the destruction of their habitat. Timber companies, many operating illegally, are methodically stripping the islands of trees. Once the jungle is cleared, much of the land is converted to huge palm oil plantations.

Since the arrival of democracy in Indonesia in 1998, corrupt officials and lax enforcement have allowed logging to continue unabated, even in national parks.

The illicit industry, fueled by global demand for wood products, has turned a few crooked businessmen into the country’s new tycoons. Forestry officials acknowledge that illegal logging is costing the government more than $3 billion a year in lost revenue.

As the forest is cut down, loggers who encounter orangutans commonly shoot the adult females and take their babies to sell as pets. In some areas, orangutans end up as dinner.

“We estimate that five die for every one that reaches the market,” said Pratje, whose work is sponsored by the Frankfurt Zoological Society, a contributor to conservation programs around the world.

In Sumatra, only 13 isolated clusters of orangutans remain. At the current rate of decline, experts estimate that the number will drop by half over the next decade. With its slow rate of reproduction and the continuing habitat destruction, the species has little chance of surviving outside well-protected reserves and zoos.

Two four-man enforcement teams hired by the center patrol the national park, watch over the orangutans and occasionally destroy illegal logging camps. It is the first time since the fall of the Suharto military regime seven years ago that wildlife regulations have been enforced in the park.

Despite a law against trading in orangutans, about 1,000 babies are sold as pets in Indonesia each year. The animals, now mainly from Borneo, can easily be purchased in Jakarta, the nation’s capital.

Bought by wealthy Indonesians as a status symbol, they are adorable as babies but difficult to handle as they grow. Once the novelty wears off, many of the animals spend their lives in cages, alone and neglected.

Prodded by environmental activists, police have seized hundreds of captive orangutans in recent years and turned them over to rehabilitation centers for release in the wild.

But the trade continues. At the open-air Jakarta pet market, a dealer named Yommy recently offered to sell a 4-month-old Borneo orangutan for $750.

“I guarantee you will get the best quality,” Yommy said, promising delivery within a week. “We already sorted the orangutans and chose only the best ones.”

The details of Mustafa’s early years are unclear, but he was probably sold in much the same manner. Pratje believes Mustafa was captured when he was about 3 and still with his mother.

At some point, Mustafa was taken to the Hotel Niagara near Sumatra’s scenic Lake Toba, where he was called Boy and kept in a garden mini-zoo with snakes, monkeys, monitor lizards and a younger orangutan, also called Boy.

His home was a cage 6 feet wide, 10 feet long and 10 feet high. “It was like a jail,” acknowledged Agun Pakpahan, Mustafa’s keeper during his last two years of captivity.

Mustafa was kept there for a decade, Pratje believes. “His crime,” he said, “was being cute when he was a baby.”

Hotel guests were allowed to feed the orangutan bananas and other fruit. Sometimes he would get upset and grab a visitor’s hand, Pakpahan said, but he never hurt anyone. He liked to climb around in the cage and be sprayed with water.

It appears Mustafa was well cared for; he does not display the animosity toward humans that is common among mistreated orangutans.

Pakpahan said he wept the day he came to work in 2002 and found that police had confiscated both of his beloved Boys.

Before his release in December, Mustafa spent 15 months at the reintroduction center at Bukit Tigapuluh, a camp of scattered wooden houses and orangutan cages about 200 miles south of the equator.

Unlike some orangutan rehabilitation centers, this one is not run as a tourist attraction. The 24-mile dirt road into the park keeps visitors and illegal loggers at bay by turning to mud in the rainy season, stranding travelers for days at a time.

The younger orangutans at the center are released from their cages during the day to explore the nearby forest and learn how to find some of the 200 foods a wild orangutan eats.

It’s up to the younger orangutans to decide when they are ready to stay overnight in the jungle. Older orangutans, when they are deemed ready, are taken a short distance into the jungle and released. The staff monitors them and feeds them if necessary.

Some disappear quickly and stay away for long periods. Others come back to the center and hang around for months. Some never adjust, like Sari, a 12-year-old who lives in the camp, sleeps in a metal barrel instead of a tree and steals vegetables from the garden rather than forage in the woods.

“It’s clear that not all orangutans can be rehabilitated or reintroduced,” said Pratje, who estimates that 20% are too accustomed to human ways to adapt to the jungle.

“If they are kept very well, like part of the family, the chances of turning them back into orangutans is smaller,” he said. “Those who were treated badly hate humans. If they hate humans, they don’t expect us to feed them.”

Of the 35 orangutans released since January 2003, four are confirmed dead and eight are unaccounted for, Pratje said. Over the long term, he expects that about half the orangutans he releases will survive.

The arrival of Mustafa presented special problems. For one thing, he was much too big to be let out for his lessons.

Keepers brought about 50 kinds of food to his cage. They demonstrated how to eat termites and break open a rattan vine with their teeth. But Pratje was uncertain how much Mustafa learned.

“There’s a lot we can’t teach,” he said. “We can show him the fruit but not the tree.”

Pratje decided to release Mustafa during the rainy season, when food was most abundant.

The keepers lured him into a metal box measuring about 4 feet long, 3 feet wide and 3 feet high. It had a small mesh screen at one end that allowed him to peer out.

On the first day, the eight bearers carried Mustafa into the forest along an old logging road, then up and down steep trails through the jungle. The temperature was above 90 degrees and the air was heavy with humidity.

“This is the most difficult one because he is the biggest and the site is also the farthest,” said Suparman, 26, an enforcement unit leader who has been involved in many of the releases. Like many Indonesians, he uses one name. “It’s also more difficult because it’s the rainy season and the trail is more slippery.”

The group stopped frequently to rest and occasionally pull off leeches. When the bearers came to a stream or river, they jumped in fully clothed to cool down. Mustafa sometimes pounded on the box when the team stopped, but most of the time he was calm.

“Mustafa came from the forest, and he should be in the forest so he can be free to find his own food and place to live,” said Bustami, a villager who helped carry him. “If we don’t protect the forest now, what will we have left?”

That afternoon, the team set up camp by the Manggatal River and made a bamboo raft for Mustafa. Hornbills flew over the towering trees. Gibbons howled continually from the nearby treetops. A rare Malayan tapir came out of the forest 50 feet from camp and crossed the river to a deep swimming hole.

The next day, the group headed up the Manggatal, wading in the shallow river alongside the raft, which was an unstable 3 feet wide and 40 feet long. Sometimes the men were up to their necks in water and struggled to keep the raft and Mustafa from tipping over.

Orangutans generally dislike water, and the plan was to release Mustafa on the far bank so he would not return to the orangutan center. The bearers carried the metal box up a small stream, set it under the trees, opened the door and retreated to the safety of the stream.

Pratje and the team, watching nervously from the water, marveled as Mustafa, who had been in the cage for more than 48 hours, climbed from tree to tree, swung on a vine and broke branches to make a nest.

After 90 minutes, Mustafa climbed a small tree by the bank of the stream. The tree bent, allowing him to climb into a tree growing from the opposite bank -- and suddenly the water wasn’t such a barrier.

Most of the team withdrew and hiked back to camp half a mile downstream. Mustafa followed on the far bank, swinging through the trees.

Within an hour, he had reached the trees across the river from the camp.

Pratje was concerned that Mustafa would trail the crew all the way back to the center. He decided that all but a small observation team would break camp and leave at 4 a.m. before Mustafa awoke.

That night, a torrential storm lashed the jungle. Mustafa spent his first night of freedom in a tree with lightning crashing all around and water pouring down in buckets.

By 4 a.m., the river had become so swollen that the current would have swept away anyone who tried to wade. The group clung to the side of the raft in the pitch dark, half wading, half floating down the swollen river.

The trick worked, and Mustafa didn’t follow.

The ape was last sighted in January near the spot where he was released. Since then, no one has seen him in the dense jungle, but Pratje believes he is still nearby.

To keep him from wandering out of the park, Pratje plans to release two females in the same area later this year.

“If Mustafa finds a place where there are one or two females,” the biologist said, “I think he will stay.”