Saving Borneo’s orangutans from the air

The buzz of blades rotating at high speed breaks the usual symphony of animal sounds in the tropical forest of Sabah, in the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo. Dawn in the jungle and the dense mist, heat and humidity are suffocating. Sweat runs down the forehead of Sol Milne, a researcher and drone pilot who, with a slight push, sends the aircraft soaring rapidly over the leafy forest canopy. The noise disturbs the stillness of the jungle dwellers. And among them, also that of the orangutans or, as they say in Indonesian, orang (man) utan (forest), the “men of the forest”. Jealous of their privacy, they blend into the thick foliage. But the researchers from HUTAN, a local conservation entity, have not come to capture in situ images of these great primates, but rather to follow their tracks.

They comb the terrain from the air, sometimes with thermal cameras, to find evidence of the presence of orangutans in the fragmented forest due to deforestation and human activity. Their objective is to locate the nests that they build every day, just like artisans, to spend the night, and that they leave at dawn to go in search of food. “We are using drones with which we take hundreds of photographs of the treetops in search of nests. Then we analyze them with the help of computer programs. This is how we were able to determine the density and distribution of the populations in order to better protect them,” says biologist Serge Wich, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University.

Serge Wich, Professor of Biology at Liverpool John Moores University piloting a drone, in Sabah (Borneo, Malaysia).SERGE WICH

The big problem for conservationists is that 80% of orangutans that resist extinction are outside protected areas. Scattered in jungle patches. They survive on little green islands amid oceans of plantations, human settlements and tangled roads. Researchers have recently discovered that orangutans have a greater presence in fragmented forests than previously thought. The females are very territorial and are used to being with their young in the same place. It is the males who travel tens of kilometers to transmit their genes. “But if we rescue them and relocate them to national parks, or if we eliminate the few natural corridors that still connect distant populations, orangutans are inevitably doomed to disappear,” summarizes Wich.

So drones are the last great ally of NGOs and foundations that fight for the survival of these animals. Before, the location and monitoring was done with incursions on foot, walking in a straight line, through dipterocarp forests ―the tallest tropical trees in the world, which can reach up to 100 meters in height― and through swampy and difficult-to-access areas. No matter how isolated a nest is, if it is possible to photograph it, it constitutes the necessary evidence to ask the authorities to protect those populations that were unknown. With their distinctive reddish-orange fur, these great apes live in the wild only in Indonesia and Malaysia. According to the latest calculations, there are about 14,000 specimens of the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) only present in Indonesia. And about 100,000 individuals belonging to another species, the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), distributed between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Image of an orangutan nest captured by a drone camera, in Sabah (Borneo, Malaysia). SERGE WITCH

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The “dwellers of the jungle” are in serious danger of extinction due to the systematic destruction of their natural habitat. Conservation entities estimate that between 1999 and 2015 around 100,000 orangutans disappeared. According to various studies, since the year 2000, Southeast Asia has lost 14% of its forests. “In the last 30 years, 80% of the natural space of orangutans has been eliminated. Every year the equivalent of 300 football fields disappear and some 6,000 orangutans die, being optimistic,” says Leif Cocks, president of The Orangutan Project. The causes are multiple: intentional fires, the expansion of the pulp industry, mining, monocultures such as oil palm, the growing subsistence agriculture and, above all, logging concessions greedy for precious raw materials such as the ramen and the meranti. “We know that in Belantikan (central Borneo) a logging company owns 97,000 hectares of forest and that some 6,000 orangutans live there. We are fighting to ensure that the forests are well managed, only then can they survive”, warns Ashley Leiman, director of the UK Orangutan Foundation, dedicated to the research and reintroduction of these great apes on the island of Borneo.

The fearsome male “Win Gayo” waits to be transferred to the remote forests of the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park (Sumatra, Indonesia).Daniel Rosengren (THE ORANGUTAN PROJECT)

Much further south, in Kumai Bay, in the Indonesian part of Borneo, also known as Kalimantan, several klotoks (or traditional river boats) with tourists on board, mostly Westerners, navigate the brown waters of the Sekonyer River until they These are mixed with the black and purified waters, coming from the rain filtering through the jungle, towards the Tanjung Puting National Park. There, in 1971, Canadian primatologist Biruté Galdikas began her orangutan conservation work. In a very precarious way, she began to follow the orangutans in the wild for months trying to understand the behavior of these animals. She also ran the first rehabilitation program for ex-captives kept as pets by local Dayakos. As she herself narrates in the book Reflejos del Eden (Pepitas de Calabaza publishing house) “my laboratory is the living laboratory that has existed for thousands of years”. Of those primeval forests that sheltered the last great arboreal primates, only scattered pieces remain today. The almost 3,000 square kilometers of the park are home to nearly 6,000 specimens, most of them descendants of those survivors, and it has become a place of pilgrimage for nature lovers from all over the world.

“They have eight times more strength than a person. Two nests are built a day. One for the night and one for the nap, as we men do”, jokes Dodi, a local guide who manages to get a few laughs from the tourist couple he accompanies. Dressed in a basketball cap and pants whose pockets are full of tiny bananas, he ties the klotok to the park’s jetty. Through some wooden walkways, he enters this sanctuary. He walks ahead making his way making guttural sounds waiting for an answer in the form of a stellar appearance of some orangutan. Suddenly, a reddish spot moves nimbly between the low branches of a tree. A female, with her calf clasped around her waist, reaches out to the guide. Quickly, she grabs one of those bananas that he offers her without resistance. Esther, a young tourist from Barcelona, ​​repeats the operation. But this time it is the baby that approaches to get the long-awaited fruit. She “she has opened my hand very delicately with her little fingers. It’s been amazing! Thank you, Dodi! ”, she exclaims, trying to stifle a cry of joy.

Orangutan specimen from Tapanuli, North Sumatra (Indonesia). ANDREW WALMSLEY

Successful coexistence or irremediable extinction

Later, in a clearing, tourists crowd in front of a wire fence. On the other side, several orangutans come down from the trees to a kind of stage made of wood to feed. On the tables there are several basins full of bananas and milk. They eat in turns. First the males, with big and fearsome jowls, like Thom, the patriarch. Then the mothers with their young. Suddenly, another female with her baby in tow breaks the protocol. With a couple of nimble movements of her arms and legs, she descends to the ground in the midst of the visitors. For a moment she decides to immortalize her moment by casting an almost human gaze towards the photographer’s camera. Then, she makes her way towards a food drum, only to later get lost in the thicket.

Esther, a tourist from Barcelona, ​​feeds a baby Bornean orangutan in the Tanjung Puting National Park (Borneo, Indonesia). DIEGO SÁNCHEZ

North of Tanjung Puting, the UK Orangutan Foundation has another research center, at Pondok Ambung, and five reintroduction camps in nearby Lamandu. “There are almost 64,000 hectares closed to tourists where we have already released more than 300 rescued individuals into the wild and many others hope to be rehabilitated soon,” says Leiman. At The Orangutan Project, also present in Sumatra, they work on the ground to protect the forests and their inhabitants, without forgetting the local communities. “We help them develop sustainable agriculture with the cultivation of vanilla or the collection of honey, for example. But the pandemic left many men without work and this increased poaching and the pressure on the environment”, laments Leif Cocks. There is no possible salvation for orangutans without understanding what are the needs and problems of rural populations. The only solution to extinction, say conservationists and NGOs, is to achieve a coexistence between people and the “men of the forest”.

A female and calf Bornean orangutan in Tanjung Puting National Park, Borneo, Indonesia. DIEGO SANCHEZ

Tapanuli, the “recent” most endangered great ape species on the planet

In 2017, scientists described a third species, the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis). The new “relative” is slimmer and not as hairy compared to, for example, the one from Borneo. This is concentrated solely in the mountainous areas of Batang-Toru, in an extension of about a thousand square kilometers in the province of North Sumatra (Indonesia). And despite its recent discovery, it has the sad honor of being the most endangered great ape species on the planet. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Tapanuli orangutan – of which only about 800 individuals are believed to exist – is critically endangered. Just one step away from extinction. Scientists warn that it has taken thousands of years to come to light, but its disappearance can be very fast. The Indonesian government has approved the construction of a gigantic dam to generate electricity by PT North Sumatra Hydro Energy, right in the place of the highest population density of Tapanuli orangutans. “There live about 42 individuals of the new species,” says Wich, a member of the international team that helped describe it.

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