In the jungles of Indonesian Borneo, a rehabilitation centre is taking in more orang utan as the country’s worst wildfires in a decade sweep through the forest home of the critically endangered animals.
The intense wildfires, burning mainly on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, began in July and could continue until November, aggravated by a severe El Nino weather pattern, the government has warned.
“It’s possible that in the months to come, they (the orang utan) will also be affected by not having enough to eat, not having enough room, enough habitat, and starvation,” said Karmele Llano Sanchez, co-founder of Yayasan Inisiasi Alam Rehabilitasi Indonesia (Yiari).
Yiari, in the Ketapang region of Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, is now looking after 90 orang utan, after rescuing 49 since August.
Over the last three years, the centre rescued three to five animals a year.
Sampurna, an orang utan that Reuters encountered in August, was found gasping for air and writhing on the ground in a palm oil plantation.
Sampurna died on Aug 30, the Forestry Ministry said last month.
Sanchez, who performed the necropsy on the great ape, said Sampurna died less than 12 hours after being rescued and had very dark lungs owing to respiratory problems, likening them to those of a heavy smoker.
From January to July this year, fires burned around 202,000ha in Indonesia. No official data for subsequent months has been released, but non-governmental organisations estimate fires have burned at least 600,000ha more since.
In 2015, fires burned nearly 960,000ha, Forestry Ministry data showed.
“I think in general, what we see is that these orang utan that were surviving in these fragments of forest, and the forest fragments are becoming smaller and smaller and smaller,” Sanchez said.
Once Yiari volunteers receive reports of orang utan sightings, they use a drone to determine the areas ravaged by the fires and whether orang utan were living there.
Equipped with tranquilisers, rescuers then drive for hours to the burned forest to find the orang utan, sometimes using a net to capture the apes before taking them to safety.
The foundation has more than 200 staff, including firefighters and veterinarians.
“Fires are occurring in many areas. As a result, the orang utan are being displaced into plantations,” said Relly Susanto, a Yiari patroller.
On a recent August day at the Yiari centre, orang utan swung through the trees and walked on vines, as youngsters ate fruit next to their mothers.
While there is no escape from the smoke even at Yiari, the centre is not currently at risk from the fires themselves and some of the rescued orang utan have been returned to the wild in safer locations. — Reuters
