Orangutans expelled from their habitat

By Iskandar Zulkarnaen

SAMARINDA, East Kalimantan (Antara): An adult orangutan was so engrossed in sucking sap from the bark of a sengon tree, in a Menamang timber estate in the hinterlands of East Kalimantan, that he paid no attention to a truck roaring passed along the road.

But try to get close to the orangutan and it would turn wild.

The animal gets upset quickly if anyone, or anything, disturbs it or if it feels that its life is in danger. After all, it has strayed far from its natural habitat.

"I don't understand why it came into this timber estate. Its habitat is Kutai National Park, quite a long way from here," said Serse Sembiring, an employee of PT Kiani Hutani Lestari, 200 km north of Samarinda.

The orangutan is one of many believed to have fled the national park in recent months because of a combination of forest fires, mining, logging and land-clearing activities.

The Samarinda administration has issued an appeal to people living in the vicinity of the national park to be on the lookout for strayed orangutans. It also said that these wild animals should be left alone.

In spite of its immense wealth, the Kutai National Park's surroundings hardly support its role as a conservancy for Kalimantan's wildlife and biodiversity resources.

To its east are coal mines and the gas town of Bontang. To the west is the Menamang timber estate, and to the north and south is Berau, inhabited mostly by farmers.

Many protected animals in Kutai National Park have abandoned their natural habitat because they feel imperiled by human activities nearby.

The recent forest fires were another reason for the migration. Some 300 hectares of the park have been razed this year.

But even without the forest fires, the national park has been shrinking because of illegal logging and the practice of slash and burn farming in the area.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) said that the 200,000-hectare national park is shrinking at a rate of 0.05 of a hectare a day.

Kutai is not alone in Kalimantan in this regard. The 1.3 million-hectare Kayan Mentarang National Park, which borders with East Malaysia, is also losing out due to the encroachment of timber estates.

Unfortunately, although orangutans are a protected species, residents in nearby villages do not take too kindly to their intrusion, despite the government's call to leave them alone.

In mid-1997, an adult orangutan was shot dead by a policeman while it was eating a villager's cassava.

The East Kalimantan office for natural resources conservation said at least 16 orangutans are known to have fled the Kutai National Park.

Two were tortured.

One of them died and the other is now in intensive care at the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center at Semboja Forest Research, Kutai.

Local people have also captured two young orangutans and would have sold them had officials from the local conservation office (KSDA) not intervened.

"It was tragic to find the orangutan killed, with gashes all over its body.

"The villagers didn't have to kill it. The orangutan would not have been troublesome if they had left it alone, undisturbed," Arsyad, manager of the forest research station, said.

"The right thing to do when a protected animal is found is to report it to our office," KSDA head Ade Rahmat said.

KSDA's other activities include retrieving orangutans and other protected animals from animal collectors.

The agency does not send the orangutans back to the wilderness immediately. They are usually sent to the rehabilitation and socialization center at Wanariset Semboja. Normally, it takes up to three years of close observation before they are released into their natural habitat.

The human intrusions into Kalimantan forests has not only upset orangutans but many other kinds of wildlife, including rare species like the sambar deer (Cervus unicolor) and wild buffaloes.

Kayan Mentarang National Parak, is home to a host of rare plants with Latin names but no local names because of the limited research conducted on them.

Kayan is turning out to contain a wealth of wildlife previously thought unlikely in Kalimantan.

Workers at PT Yamaker, a forest concessionaire, said they have spotted a group of elephants in the park. This is an extraordinary discovery because elephants were thought to have disappeared from Kalimantan decades ago.

Others claim to have spotted rhinos, which have been considered extinct in Kalimantan.

The rhinos are thought to be two-horned ones called water buffalo rhinos from the subspecies Dicerorhinus harissoni.

Rahmat said the Rhino Foundation in Java has been alerted of this discovery in the hope that proper research can be conducted.