Indonesia Orangutans Use Rules of the Jungle to Test Saviors’ Skills

Urinating on its pursuers from the tree tops, a Sumatran orangutan shows no sign of wanting to leave its home, a scrap of jungle in the middle of a cocoa plantation.

The plantation is inexorably expanding, however, and what is left of the furry red animal’s habitat will soon be providing beans for the chocolate lovers of the world.

The hapless clutch of people wielding chain saw and nets under the tree were part of a project sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature to save the threatened apes by moving them to forests safe from cocoa farmers, developers, loggers and animal traders.

The orangutan rules the jungles of Indonesia and Malaysia, where it has no natural enemies except r man.

A baby stays with its mother for years, clinging with little hands onto her long chest fur as she swings from tree to tree. It is helpless without her, and she protects it fiercely.

In Indonesia it is illegal either to keep baby apes as pets or to trade in the animal internationally.

A live baby fetches $190 locally, four times that in Jakarta, and up to $5,000 in New York, according to a local forestry official.

It is not hard to capture a baby orangutan. Shoot the mother and you have the child.

Trapping an adult is a different story, however.

Drive it up a tree, cut off its escape route by felling the surrounding trees, and then chop down the tree it sits in. The orangutan will scuttle down the swaying trunk straight into the waiting nets. Easy.

Or so the textbook says.

“I’ve seen the way orangutans operate in the wild,” said Michael Griffiths, the nature fund’s representative in Sumatra’s main city, Medan.

“They sit up there staking out the scene from their vantage point and then come down and make off through an opening no one on the ground even thought of.”

Sure enough, annoyed by net handlers yelling instructions and dogs yapping at the base of the tree, one orangutan slid down the trunk and lumbered off into the bushes, dogs following.

It paused long enough to turn and give the dogs a withering look, then sped up another tree.

Eventually two orangutans were caught and taken off the plantation.

“The plantation called us in instead of just going out and shooting the animals or leaving them to die as they cleared the land. That’s a real step forward,” Griffiths said.

The apes were released in Gunung Leuser National Park, near the nature fund’s north Sumatra Orangutan Rehabilitation Station.

The station also gets young orangutans when they have been seized by the authorities from captivity or when they outgrow their welcome as pets and are turned in.

“As pets, they don’t know anything (about survival). We have to teach them to climb, to hunt for food,” a field worker named Ketut said.

After a short time in quarantine to rid them of ailments unknown in the jungle, and basic training in the art of swinging on vines, they are taken to the forest.

There, on a platform up a tree, fieldworkers feed them a daily diet of milk and bananas.

“Bananas, bananas, bananas. A very boring diet, and we (intentionally) never give them quite enough,” Ketut said. “That way they get bored and hungry and go off hunting on their own.”

Forays for more interesting food take the animals farther and farther afield. Some stop coming back to the feeding place of their own accord, some need a little encouragement.

“We lug them off into the forest, sometimes five days’ walk away, where they can have their own territory,” Ketut said.

With its 3,100 square miles of land, Gunung Leuser park gives the apes plenty of protected territory to choose from. The nature fund estimates there are about 2,000 orangutans in Sumatra, and another 5,000 in Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo.

The effort to protect the beasts has gone international. Six orangutans intercepted in Bangkok on their way to Yugoslavia were returned to Jakarta in late May.

“We’re serious about this,” forestry official Ajisasmito said. “If we find any more Indonesian orangutans abroad, we will extradite them too.”