On Saturday, 6 October 2012, East Kalimantan Conservation and Natural Resources Authority (BKSDA) contacted the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF) to check the health of three recently rescued orangutans: a male of around 1-2 years old, a female of 3-4 years old, and another female of 4-5 years old.
The young male orangutan had been kept as a pet for a year by a local community member after he found this small individual on a road near to an oil palm plantation, whilst the 3-2 year-old female orangutan, who was also kept as a pet for three years, was found in a private plantation in Sangatta. Finally, a local community in Samarinda handed over the 4-5 year-old female orangutan to the Mulawarman University however her background story is not really known.
These stories are the same for so many of our other orangutans who are all victims of deforestation for human development purposes. They are left with no natural habitat hence no home. When areas are cleared of forest, orangutans are often found wandering through plantations desperately looking for food and are regarded as a threat or simply pests. The adults are often killed and infants caught and kept as pets. Often these poor infants are kept in terrible conditions either chained up or kept in tiny filthy cages. Many of them don’t survive.
The BOS Foundation has rescued thousands of orangutans from areas of conflict. Our two Orangutan Reintroduction Centres; Samboja Lestari in East Kalimantan and Nyaru Menteng in Central Kalimantan currently care for a total of 850 orangutans. We provide welfare, healthcare and rehabilitation to enable them to be returned to safe secure natural habitat. The rehabiliation process can take more than 7 years as when a young orangutan is taken away from its mother, it loses a whole lifetime of early learing in how to survive in the forest, which it normally gets from its mother for the first 6-8 years of its life. Our dedicated carers provide those skills to our orangutans so that they can one day be returned to their natural home.
Female Orangutan 4-5 yo
Female Orangutan 3-4 old
Male Orangutan 1-2 yo
Although our resources are stretched to the maximum, once again the BOS Foundation has helped rescue these orphaned orangutans. This year, we have released 6 orangutans from our rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan. However, within the same year we have taken 7 orangutans into our center, including these three newcomers. This means we are back where we started in terms of the number of orangutans in our East Kalimantan rehabilitation center and in terms of meeting the goals set by the Government of Indonesia of releasing all of our rehabilitated orangutans by 2015. In fact, we now have 1 individual more than we initially had in the beginning of the year! A little space that we managed to free by releasing orangutans have again been filled to maximum capacity.
Therefore, on behalf of our reintroduction program at Samboja Lestari in East Kalimantan and BKSDA, we call on all of our friends to support and donate to us to help us look after these orangutans. We ask companies who either directly or indirectly cause deforestation to take the responsibility for the orangutans welfare. If everyone supports, we can share the burden of responsibilty and work to make sure all our able bodied orangutans can once again be returned to the wild where they belong.
The BOS Foundation, together with the KLHK and the BKSDA of Central Kalimantan will soon conduct the 44th orangutan release from the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Centre to the Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park (TNBBBR).
Every year on April 22, we celebrate Earth Day to honour the planet that is home to us all.
It was a usual day at the Nyaru Menteng forest school, where young orangutans were learning from one another while their human surrogate mothers looked on from below.
