Logging Threatens Survival of Orangutans

Seven-month-old Nabima often has nightmares. She wakes in the night screaming and crying, says Lone Droscher-Nielsen, who is looking after the little orangutan on Borneo Island.

At only a few weeks old, Nabima and her mother were shot out of a tree by tribesmen in Borneo’s remote interior. As she lay watching on the ground, her mother was killed, skinned and eaten.

Nabima was bundled up and taken to a nearby town where she was sold for about $2 as a pet. Not long afterward, a team of Indonesian wildlife officers--working on a tip by foreign conservationists--rescued her and took her to a nearby internationally funded orangutan rehabilitation refuge.

Like the 66 other apes in the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Reintroduction Project, Nabima is now being cared for by trained handlers and is due to be released into a guarded sanctuary in the jungle sometime next year.

With their natural habitat shrinking at an alarming rate due to rapacious logging, urban expansion and deliberately lit bush fires, orangutans and other wildlife on Borneo Island are finding themselves the first casualties.

Environmentalists say that in the past decade, the number of apes on Borneo and nearby Sumatra islands has halved to about 25,000. Within another 10 years, they are likely to be extinct if the government does not do something about it quickly.

But swift action to protect the environment is not of the highest concern to Indonesian politicians at the moment. The economy is in tatters, a political crisis is occupying the nation’s leaders and communal fighting is gripping much of the world’s fourth most-populous country.

Throughout this sprawling archipelagic country, loggers are wiping out centuries-old tropical rain forests as fast as the trees can be chain-sawed. Even national parks, the last sanctuaries for many species, are being destroyed.

“There is no political will in Indonesia to stop illegal logging,” said Julian Newmon, a member of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency. “When the forests are gone, the orangutans will be gone as well.”

He said his organization had given Indonesia’s government the name of 18 timber barons responsible for much of the illegal logging, but little action had been taken.

“The people who are supposed to be protecting the forests are often the ones logging them,” Newmon said. “Every river on Borneo is clogged with cut logs floating downstream to timber mills.”

Much of the teak, ramin and other valuable hardwoods are illegally exported to the United States, Europe, Japan and China, Newmon said.

With the jungles being plundered, the survival of several other species, in addition to the orangutans, are also threatened.

Asian elephants on Borneo and Sumatra are being forced to forage in farms and gardens for food. This, in turn, is leading to increasing conflicts with villagers. As in Africa, many of the elephants are also hunted for their valuable ivory tusks.

The Sumatran and Javan rhinoceros are also threatened with extinction. Once they roamed across much of Southeast Asia. Now there are only about 350 of the single-horned Sumatran rhinos left in the wild.

And only eight Javan rhinos survive in Ujung Kulong national park on the southwestern tip of Java. Tens of thousands of the smallest of among half a dozen rhino species roamed the island before being exterminated in the past century.

In Aceh province, on the northern tip of Sumatra, the reclusive animals are finding themselves the victim of a long-running guerrilla war.

As well as being hunted for food or to be sold as pets, hundreds of orangutans are smuggled every year to the United States and other industrialized countries, where they fetch up to $30,000 on the black market. For every five baby apes shipped overseas, one usually survives the journey.

Indonesia’s President Abdurrahman Wahid recently replaced his forestry minister, saying his government was under foreign pressure to save the jungles. However, local environmentalists are not optimistic that much will change.

With their survival threatened, orangutan rehabilitation clinics, like the Nyaru Menteng one in Central Kalimantan province, are now more vital than ever.

“They are big, gentle giants,” Droscher-Nielsen, a Danish-born environmentalist, said as she led an orangutan by the hand from its cage. “It’s becoming worse and worse in the wild for them here. A lot of people are killing them.”

When the apes come into the clinic, they go into quarantine cages to check for diseases. With 95% of their DNA identical to that of humans, some suffer from contagious human illnesses, such as hepatitis B and tuberculosis.

The animals are then moved to larger cages to learn how to interact with other orangutans before being released temporarily into a fenced-off section of forest to learn bush survival skills.

Droscher-Nielsen said some of the apes have spent most of their lives in a domesticated environment, making it difficult to rehabilitate them.

One 4-year-old female orangutan called Veve was breast-fed as a baby by its human surrogate mother, she said. Another one came into the clinic cross-eyed from watching too much television.

“It liked watching Indian films during the day and soccer by night,” Droscher-Nielsen said.

Droscher-Nielsen is searching for funding to acquire an isolated piece of jungle to use as a release site for the rehabilitated apes.