Where Your Money Goes
Orang-utan
Charity: Borneo Orang Survival Foundation UK
Project: Nyaru Menteng Reintroduction Project
Where in the World? Borneo
Grant: £20,000
Image courtesy Borneo Orang Survival Foundation
There are two species of orang-utan, with one species living on the island of Sumatra and another on Borneo. Both are endangered as their forests become chopped down for wood or converted to agriculture.
The majority of remnant wild populations are located outside of protected areas. They favour low-lying peat swamp forest, the exact habitat that is being chopped down and converted to huge oil-palm plantations. As a result, many orang-utans starve to death and others become easy targets for attack by humans. Poaching and the pet-trade remain major threats to orang-utans across most of Borneo.
WHERE YOUR MONEY GOES
In Borneo, orang-utans face two main threats. Some are taken from their mothers and then sold and kept as pets. Many more starve or are killed as their forest home is chopped down and converted to plantations used to grow palm oil. The Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Reintroduction Project aims to save these stranded individuals. It rescues and rehabilitates orphaned and threatened orang-utans, and reintroduces them back into the wild.
HOW YOUR MONEY IS HELPING
The BBC Wildlife Fund has given £20,000 to the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Reintroduction Project to help educate local communities about the plight of the orang-utan and to rescue and rehabilitate individual apes.
The project is based in Palangka Raya within the Central Kalimantan region of Indonesian Borneo. It is home to some 650 orang-utans, making it the largest primate rehabilitation centre in the world.
Your money is helping in three key areas: it is helping to raise education and awareness, allowing the project to bring local children to visit the centre and its work at least once a week. It is funding a programme that confiscates captive orang-utans and it helps pay for a much needed microbiology lab that is used to perform health checks on all apes that join the centre.
As well as saving individual orang-utans, the project is fully staffed by local people, providing them an alternative income to plantation work, logging and hunting. It also offers education, health care, insurance and low or no interest loans for business ventures to the local community and helps raise awareness among local schoolchildren about the plight of the orang-utan and its habitat.
OUTLOOK
The population of Borneo orang-utans has decreased by 60 per cent over the past 50 years, a trend that is expected to continue. Fewer than 50,000 wild individuals may survive.
Preventing the destruction of their forest habitat is the key to the long term survival of the species. Individual orang-utans can be helped by rescuing them from illegal captivity.
Rehabilitation takes time, however. An orang-utan may require six to seven years of rehabilitation before it can be released back into the wild.
DID YOU KNOW?
Female orang-utans do not undergo the menopause, despite living to well over 50 years of age.
An orang-utan will chew a single piece of fruit for up to 20 minutes before spitting out the seeds.
Orang-utans climb differently from African apes, such as the gorilla and bonobo. Orang-utans take longer strides, moving their arms and legs a greater distance during each climbing step, and rotate their major joints over a greater range of motion.
The word orang-utan (also written orangutan, orang utan and orangutang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning ‘person’ and hutan meaning ‘forest’, thus ‘person of the forest’.
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