Orangutan forest school in Indonesia takes on its first eight students - GAP Project

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Orangutan forest school in Indonesia takes on its first eight students

Orangutan forest school in Indonesia takes on its first eight students

posted in 27 Jun 2018

A team of scientists and caretakers aim to give orphaned orangutan a chance to return to the wild.

BY JIM TAN // Mongabay Series: Great Apes

On May 17, 2018, the first eight orange-furred students arrived to begin their studies at a new orangutan forest school in the province of East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. Under the watchful eye of primatologist Signe Preuschoft, the goal is to help these orangutan orphans learn all the skills they’ll need to live independent lives in the wild, such as how to climb trees and build nests for the night, as well as which foods to eat and how to eat them.The forest school is run cooperatively by an Indonesian organization called Jejak Pulang, which Preuschoft established in partnership with the Indonesian government, and Four Paws, an international animal welfare organization based in Vienna. “Jejak Pulang” translates from Indonesian, fittingly, as, “Footprints of the way home.” Four Paws provides Jejak Pulang with enough funding to take on up to 30 orangutan orphans in its 240-hectare (590-acre) forest school, with the aim of reintroducing them back to the forest.

“It’s wonderful to work with young living beings that are every day improving,” Preuschoft said. “They are so brave. They always want to make the most of what they have got.”

Orangutans in crisis

Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) are classified as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. A recent study published in Current Biology estimates that over 100,000 orangutans have been lost across Borneo between 1999 and 2015. The remaining orangutans exist in a number of geographically isolated groups known as “metapopulations,” and the study found that only 38 of the 64 Bornean metapopulations have more than 100 individuals — the threshold that scientists estimate is required for a viable population.

In Borneo, the orangutans’ natural forest habitat is disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 1973 and 2016, 30 percent of the island’s old-growth forest was converted to farmland for crops such as oil palm or lost as a result of forest fires — 195,000 square kilometers (75,300 square miles). “There is no land planning,” Preuschoft said, “only land grabbing.”

But the study also found large declines in orangutan numbers within the remaining forest, indicating that habitat loss is not the only threat. Hunting for bushmeat, the illegal pet trade and human-wildlife conflict over resources — plantation workers killing orangutans to protect their crops, for example — are all also important drivers of orangutan declines, according to the study’s lead author, Maria Voigt.

(To be continued…)

Read the full article in Mongabay.com

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