A large population of orangutans has been documented by conservationists conducting a survey in a remote part of Indonesia Borneo.
A team of researchers led by Erik Meijaard, a senior ecologist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), counted 219 orangutan nests, suggesting a population of 1000 or more of the critically endangered species of red ape in the heart of a 2-million-acre forest area in Sangkulirang limestone mountains in East Kalimantan Province. The newly discovered population is a rare subspecies known as the black Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus morio). Overall 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans survive in the forests of Borneo and Sumatra, but these are increasingly threatened by habitat loss from logging, fires, and expansion of industrial tree plantations and oil palm estates.
TNC says it will work with local governments to protect critical orangutan habitat in the region. The NGO is currently developing a forest carbon conservation project in Kalimantan.
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(08/14/2006) The Wildlife conservation Society-Indonesia Program said that Indonesia’s population of orangutans fell nearly 43 percent in the past decade, from 35,000 in 1997 to 20,000 today. The decline has been caused by ongoing forest destruction and poaching in Kalimantan (Borneo) and Sumatra, the only two islands that still support wild orangutans. Environmental groups have warned that red ape could be extinct in the wild without urgent conservation measures.
(05/24/2006) A look at conservation efforts in Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. I’m in Tanjung Puting National Park in southern Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. At 400,000 hectares (988,000 acres) Tanjung Puting is the largest protected expanse of coastal tropical heath and peat swamp forest in southeast Asia. It’s also one of the biggest remaining habitats for the critically endangered orangutan, the population of which has been great diminished in recent years due to habitat destruction and poaching. And orangutans have become the focus of a much wider effort to save Borneo’s natural environment. We are headed to Campy Leakey, named for the renowned Kenyan paleontologist Louis Leakey. Here lies the center of the Orangutan Research conservation Project. Established by Birute Mary Galdikas, a preeminent primatologist and founder of the Orangutan Foundation International (OFI), the project seeks to support the conservation and understanding of the orangutan and its rain forest habitat while rehabilitating ex-captive individuals. The Orangutan Research conservation Project is the public face of orangutan conservation in this part of Kalimantan, the Indonesia-controlled part of Borneo. Borneo, the third largest island in the world, was once home to some of the world’s most majestic, and forbidding forests. With swampy coastal areas fringed by mangrove forests and a mountainous interior, much of the terrain was virtually impassable and unexplored. Headhunters ruled the remote parts of the island until a century ago.
