Orangutan only one of Indonesia's vanishing species

Orangutan only one of Indonesia's vanishing species

By Daniel Cooney

NYARU MENTENG, Central Kalimantan (AP): 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.

At only a few weeks old, Nabima and her mother were shot out
of a tree by tribesmen in the remote interior of Borneo, called
Kalimantan in Indonesia and shared with Malaysia.

As she lay watching on the ground, her mother was killed,
skinned and eaten.

She was bundled up and taken to a nearby town where she was
sold for about US$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 have halved to about
25,000. Within another 10 years, they are likely to be extinct if
the government does not do something about it urgently.

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, much of them
illegally, 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 orangutan, 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.

Threatened

The Sumatran and Javan rhinoceroses 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 a fragmentary population of Javan rhinos survive in Ujung
Kulon 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.

With loggers encroaching deeper into the dense jungles,
Sumatran tigers are also being forced from their bush hide-outs
and are becoming easy prey for poachers after their valuable
pelts.

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, only 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 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 percent of their DNA makeup
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 female 4-year-old orangutan called Veve was breast-fed as
a baby by its human surrogate mother, she said. It understands a
lot of Chinese. 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.

On the Net: The Balikpapan Orangutan Survival Foundation:
http://www.redcube.nl/bos Environmental Investigation Agency:
http://www.eia-international.org/