Pongo Pygmaeus, Borneo

The first things you notice about Pongo pygmaeus are that they seem to have four hands (instead of two hands and two feet), their long hair is a vibrant copper colour, and the light of intelligence shines in their strikingly human eyes. As they nimbly clamber through vines and treetops in search of forest fruits, or amble through the leaf-litter beside tea-coloured peat swamps, it’s easy to imagine how they blended into the jungle landscape undisturbed for so many millennia.

The Borneo orangutan lives in the broadleaf subtropical swamp rainforests and also in mountainous highland forest. They eat fruit, bark, woody vines, flowers and shoots, and sometimes bird eggs and mineral-rich earth. Their favourite fruits include durian, jackfruit, lychees, mangoes, figs and mangosteen. Much of the water they consume comes from the fruit in their diet, but they also sometimes drink from tree cavities. Occasionally they eat insects, but this is more a habit of the Sumatran orangutan. Bornean orangutans will travel great distances to source fruit, which is the staple of their diet – they eat over 300 varieties, favouring varieties with a sugary or fatty pulp. It appears that orangutans visualise a very detailed ‘map’ of the forest, including the fruiting cycles of many trees, in order to effectively search for food. Mothers teach this mapping information to their young.

Every night, the orangutans make sleeping nests in the treetops, fashioned from branches and foliage. The nests must be sturdy, since males can weigh up to 115 kilograms (255 pounds); females are about a third or half that size. Besides being bigger, mature males can be distinguished by their longer hair, throat pouches, and the prominent cheek flanges which frame their faces. Younger males lack the cheek flanges and tend to be much more sexually aggressive in nature.

Orangutans are more solitary than other apes, with the Borneans being even less gregarious than their Sumatran counterparts. Males and females only pair up to reproduce. They stick together for several days to ensure successful mating, but soon afterward they go their separate ways.

Orangutans reach puberty at about eight years of age, but females aren’t ready to have babies until they are in their teens.� They only give birth once every 6 – 11 years, which is the longest time between births of any mammal on earth, resulting in a maximum of four babies in one lifetime. Newborns nurse every three or four hours; at four months they begin to take soft food from their mother’s mouth. The babies cling to their mothers by entwining their fingers in her long fur. Orangutans have the longest childhood dependency of any animal: their young suckle until they are about four years old. Male offspring will remain with their mother for another few years; females might stay into their teens to learn parenting skills as their younger siblings are raised.

In the wild, orangutans live for about 35 to 40 years, and some have survived into their 50s in captivity. One of the most extraordinary sounds in the jungle is the mature male orangutan’s ‘long call’, which is used to advertise their presence, locate females, and warn other males away.

Recent research by Harvard psychologist James Lee suggests that orangutans are the world’s most intelligent animal other than humans. In the mid-1990s a population of orangutans was found to be regularly using feeding tools, which previously was thought to be an intellectual innovation restricted to chimpanzees. Since Jane Goodall’s studies in the 1960s, it was thought that chimpanzees were the brightest primates. However, Dr Carel van Schaik, a Dutch primatologist working with Duke University, later found that orangutans used large leaves as umbrellas and nest-shelters, and in some areas were establishing a complex culture in which older animals taught the youngsters how to find food and make tools. The orangutans showed learning abilities and a capacity for problem solving which exceeded the chimpanzees’.

The ongoing existence of the Bornean orangutan is under grave threat from habitat destruction. The World Bank speculates that the forests of Kalimantan could be totally obliterated by 2010 due to mechanised logging. Over the last 20 years, orangutans have lost over 80% of their habitat due to deforestation (both legal and illegal). The burning season of ‘97-‘98, which led to uncontrollable forest blazes – accounted for the deaths of 1/3 of Borneo’s wild population. These fires destroyed 95% of Kutai National Park in East Kalimantan - a textbook example of an extinction-inducing disaster.

Oil Palm plantations pose another serious threat to the orangutans’ wellbeing: conversion of forests into plantations is the primary cause of permanent forest loss in both Indonesia and Malaysia.

Most of these plantations are legal, but illegal logging is a problem Indonesia is struggling to face. In 2003, it’s estimated that up to 88% of timber logged in Indonesia was illegal, affecting 37 out of 41 national parks. Most of the timber goes to China, Japan and other Asian markets, with the remainder heading to Europe and the USA. Many unwitting consumers in the West purchase the Asian timber products once they are exported. The Indonesian government has put laws in place to prevent illegal logging, but lacks the resources to police and prosecute offenders.

Other dangers to the orangutans include poaching and the bushmeat trade. As their habitat shrinks, orangutans increasingly come into conflict with humans. Sometimes they wander into plantations and gardens in search of food, causing villagers to consider them as pests. Either through ignorance of the law, or deliberate contravention of it due to hunger or poverty, local people then hunt the interloping animals. When adult females are killed, their babies are sold as pets, their skulls can be sold as valuable curios, and their flesh can be eaten. When threatened species are hunted (usually illegally, unsustainably and commercially), the meat is known as bushmeat, the sale of which contributes to the extinction crisis.

Unfortunately the illegal pet trade is still thriving, with many orphaned baby orangutans falling into the hands of unscrupulous traffickers. It is estimated that for every orangutan that reaches the pet market, four orangutans die in prior attempts. Causes of death include falls to the forest floor due to their mother’s death (usually by gunshot), trauma after the same (possibly having seeing their mother killed and eaten), succumbing to disease (often contracted from humans), or an inability to survive the poor conditions in which they are kept following their capture. Like all ‘wild’ animals, orangutans make bad pets: they might look adorable when they’re little, but they grow up into large, unmanageable adults who can be dangerous to humans and can’t be kept in confined spaces. Killing mother orangutans to take their babies has a devastating effect on the precarious survival of the species.