Hello again, sorry for the silence but I have just had another fantastic week in Tanjung Puting National Park. Actually, on Monday I was in Lamandau, on a peat-lands survey, but I was still out of the office and in the forest, which made for a good day!
In case you’re wondering where these places I keep mentioning are, here’s a map (Pangkalanbun is where our office is). At Pondok Ambung I caught up with René, the German crocodile researcher, and then spent a wonderful couple of days at Camp Leakey. There were orangutans everywhere! What was great was seeing some unusual things. Foremost on that list was food sharing between two adult females.
Above and below, Rani and Riga - sharing food
Young orangutans will often sample what their mothers are eating. This is part of the learning process; finding out what is good to eat. However, on Wednesday, I watched two adult orangutans Rani and her daughter Riga sharing food. What made this doubly interesting is that it was Riga who was giving food to her mother. There may be some biological reason for this – Rani’s three year old son is obviously Riga’s half-brother but that seems a stretch. Normally, the genetic drivers of caring-behaviour are down the generations, not up them. This could have been a case of dominance; the older female forcing the younger one to submit. However, it is also quite likely that it was a simple act of altruism: Riga had enough to eat so was happy to share with her mother. The final excitement of the week was finding a dead and half-eaten crocodile. We reported this to René who examined the carcass. He estimated it to have been around three metres in length and was killed in a fight with another crocodile. Almost certainly the other crocodile was bigger.
Sekonyer River, TPNP Having just bathed in that river it was kind of sobering to know there was a bigger crocodile out there….. As always thanks for your comments, questions and support of our work. Maciej G, thank you very much for your $50 donation at the end of June. Will try and post again soon - the daily powercuts aren’t making it easy!
Where did last week go? I spent most of it in Tanjung Puting National Park, having lots of fun and adventures, and only got back to the office on Friday. We are still experiencing lots of power cuts. On Saturday, we had a five hour one, 8 am to 1 pm, which put paid to much serious work. So here I am, Sunday night, attempting to tell you how I spent my week, obviously, without much internet!I went first to Buluh Besar Guard Post in the middle of the Park, and from there, to Pondok Ambung and Camp Leakey, where I met up with Brigitta. However, this all deserves its own post (to come soon), so I will just cut to today. My back garden has been as over-productive as usual and the latest banana tree, to try to outgrow the electrical wire to my water-pump, needed felling. What do we do with banana trees? Give them to Montana.
Montana with his banana tree. I went to the Orangutan Care Centre & Quarantine with a group of visiting researchers and found the big guy looking unusually bored. He was laid flat out with his massive head resting on his two fists. He didn’t even turn his head as we approached. Once the banana tree was near enough to be on offer, however, he sprang into action in a way that reminded me – yet again – never get too close: He’s quick! The stalk was inside in seconds, and then the leaves. And Montana was one happy orangutan.
Less pleased were the adolescents occupying the next-door enclosure, who wouldn’t normally dare so much as whimper at the adjacent cheek-padded Montana. Today, though, they were happy to demand attention from the visitors. We gave them extra leaves and they were delighted. I even managed to get a smile from one of them (unlike young chimpanzees that will literally giggle if tickled, orangutans seldom express pleasure), getting a full toothy grin was reward in itself.
Me with the adolescents. Thanks for your comments, Sheryl and Annie, about the paper (which we contributed to) mentioned in my last post, “Distribution and conservation status of the orangutan (Pongo spp.) on Borneo and Sumatra: How many remain?”. I agree, it is important to think positively and I don’t believe orangutans will become extinct. I think the programmes that we, and our partners, are working on in Central Kalimantan, will ensure this never occurs.
A very quick post. I’m off to Tanjung Puting National Park and will be back on Thursday. At some point I’ll hopefully be tracked down by Brigitta who has her goody bag for the Orangutan Care Centre and Quarantine. At the end of last week the scientific paper, “Distribution and conservation status of the orangutan (Pongo spp.) on Borneo and Sumatra: How many remain?” was published in Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation. Dr. Serge Wich, Togu Simorangkir from Yayorin (our Indonesian partner organisation) and other orangutan conservation experts, published new findings that reveal endangered wild orangutan (Pongo spp.) populations are declining more sharply in Sumatra and Borneo than previously estimated. It isn’t all doom and gloom so have a read of the full press release from the Great Ape Trust website. Many thanks. - There is a problem with our blogroll but it should be back up soon.
Sheryl raised two interesting points in her comment on the illegal farming: 1) “I’m sure the farmers knew they were on reserve land” We are pretty sure they did too as, in this part of the world, the Reserve is where the trees are! However, this is almost impossible to prove and, even knowing it is a conservation area, won’t necessarily stop the villagers from laying a claim to the land.
Slash and burn is commonly used to clear the forest.
Illegal settlement in cleared forest. Secondly, Sheryl wrote “don’t people have to own the land or have permits from landowners to burn forest and start a farm? I mean, here I couldn’t just drive out to the country and start farming!” Bizarrely, Indonesian laws concerning community use of forest lands still end up promoting forest clearance. If you clear the land it is deemed an improvement. Anyone who improves the land has de-facto usage rights to it. And those rights are passed down from generation to generation. I have been in some very old secondary forest only to be told this is “Mr so and so’s land…” In the case of the illegal farms, our only weapon is that the farm was clearly established after the Reserve was gazetted. It is illegal. Kind regards, Stephen
Following on from my last post “Busy, busy, busy”, here’s some more detail about the illegal farming. The farm was obviously productive and well-maintained. It had a fence around it to keep out wild pigs and deer. Inside, bananas, rice, cassava and a number of vegetables were all growing well. Indeed, if our agricultural demonstration plots looked that good we could be justifiably proud.
But there was one big problem with this farm – it is inside the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. It is obvious from the surrounding forest the farmers were not making use of fallow land, as we try to do with the demonstration farms. No, here, they had cleared the forest and then burnt it to boost soil fertility.
Note the surrounding tree-line. This situation gives us a problem, as there is no real alternative to evicting them. We do not wish to have a confrontation with the surrounding villages; one of our aims is to establish harmonious relations between the neighbouring communities and conservation areas. However, if there is a flagrant violation of the law, as in this case, there is little that can be done. The farmers can not be allowed to continue. They are clearly damaging the forest, increasing the risk of forest fires and would almost certainly persecute any wildlife that took to crop raiding.
Once forest, now farm land. Technically, the farmers could be arrested, but pragmatically this would only inflame local sensibilities and even the police would be reluctant to arrest someone for (as they will see it) “just growing food”. The balancing act facing us, therefore, is to get the people out of the Reserve without turning their whole village against us but, at the same time, creating a strong enough front to deter anyone else from attempting to farm there. The Forestry Department officials, under whose auspices we work, have suggested giving the farmers six months to complete the current harvest after which they must leave. This seems reasonable. We can easily monitor them to make sure there is no further expansion or burning. We can also make use of this time to erect a signboard/ block on the river the farmers are using for access to prevent anyone else from saying “I did not know it was a Conservation Area”. It is worrying that people still do not respect Lamandau’s borders but it is encouraging that our patrols clearly have good enough ground coverage that they were able to detect the farm and, secondly, that the Forestry Department has the resolve to deal with it. A strong display now will go along way to reducing such incidents in the future. - P.S. Brigitta, thank you for the comment. It is a pity about the video question and answer session, but it will still be good to meet up. As I said, I will be at Pondok Ambung or Camp Leakey on the 10th, so we’ll meet up then. Safe travels!
Hi Sheryl We aren’t sure why it says ‘comments closed’ on Stephen’s last post -I don’t think we have done anything wrong our end! Wildlife Direct are looking into it and hopefully it will be resolved soon. Many thanks, Cathy, Orangutan Foundation
Once again, I find myself in the unenviable position of having to apologise for the long silence. I know I have neglected to keep you up to date with all that is going on in orangutan-land. If I have an excuse it is only that I have been struggling to keep up myself. June has looked like this:
(Supply boat after it was refloated, repaired and painted) First week: Five straight days in the field investigating a case of illegal farming inside the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve, which is when I managed to get Jak hopelessly lost (or vice-versa as I still maintain!) followed by a meeting with the mangers of one of the palm-oil plantations which border the Reserve. After that, we continued onto Sukamara, the next district capital, where we are establishing an office.
Second week: To Jakarta where Astri, I and representatives of seven other projects attended a coordination meeting with the European Commission Delegation prior to the opening of the Indonesia Environment Week exhibition. If nothing else, the meeting made us proud our little project is holding its own at the sharp end. I also met with the director of a company which conducts bio-carbon surveys. Many people are talking about trying to protect forests through carbon-offsets, or Reduced Emissions through avoided Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) projects, but very little is actually happening on the ground. That is a ring into which we want to throw our hat – Belantikan is a stand-out candidate for protection. For a taste of what this involves have a look at http://www.climate-standards.org/ and follow the links to “Climate, Community & Biodiversity Project Design Standards, Draft Second Edition”. Finally, I met with the coordinators of the cross border, USAID funded project we are working on.
(Rene Bonke: He should be catching crocodiles!” and “The snake he caught”) Third week: Should have been back in the office attending to paperwork, but it did not turn out that way! Our supply boat was battered in heavy seas, made it to the Buluh Besar guard post then promptly sank. Our supervisor, Teguh, was apologetic but he really needn’t have been: clearly not his fault. I also went back to Lamandau to check on progress at the new release camp which the volunteers are building. Then, last weekend, I went up to Pondok Ambung to have a few days with the crocodile researcher.
In between there was the usual mix of staff management issues (how do you budget for out-of-the-blue double digit inflation?); an audit; a volunteer with a horribly infected leg derived from over-zealous scratching of mosquito bites and my Indonesian counter-part saying he can’t continue to work in Borneo with his wife – who is expecting their first child – still in Java. He has been like a second limb to me, and his departure is big blow.
I am sure like many other people reading this blog, my problem is trying to juggle too many balls at the same time. A problem which is made worse by my being a mere male who is genetically incapable of multi-tasking! The up-side, however, is that I did manage to sneak up to Camp Leakey to see Uning the daughter of one of my favourite orangutans, Unyuk. Uning has just had her first baby. It was great to see them.
Many thanks, Orangutan Foundation
Stephen is currently in Jakarta so a quick post on his behalf. We have just received our donation’s report for the second half of May and we are extremely grateful to following people who have donated towards the Orangutan Care Centre’s enclosure repairs; Paula B $200, Maciej G $100, Sheryl B $25 and Hilary B $300. In total we have raised $2,375 which means we are only $625 off our $3,000 target. Thank you to everyone who has supported us with this appeal. For those of you in the UK you might be interested to know the Foundation are holding a Supporters’ and Members’ Evening on Wednesday 2nd July, at Asia House in London. Stephen, who will be back in the UK, and Ashley Leiman, Director and Founder of the Orangutan Foundation, will be giving a presentation about the Foundation’s projects, achievements and challenges. Please visit our website for more details. Many thanks, Cathy, Orangutan Foundation.
“Hey Jak” I called over my shoulder “Are you following me or the path?”. “Following you” Jak replied. Not good. I wasn’t leading; I was merely walking in front. For the last 100 odd metres I’d become increasingly convinced we’d left the path and were following a pig’s trail through the forest. It was 5pm. It would be dark in an hour. We were both soaked to the skin and had been walking in ankle deep water for the last twenty minutes, as a result of the afternoon downpour. And a 100 metres may not sound much but given I wasn’t sure of the exact distance our chances of back-tracking weren’t promising. I remembered there was a tree with unusually large leaves where the proper trail re-entered the forest after crossing the open bit where we were now standing. Jak’s face was a picture when I said “look for a tree with big leaves”. In a forest, right… good idea.
(Example of the forest terrain, without the water!) Still, I had my revenge. Jak got out his GPS which told us accurately where we were on the earth’s surface and it even told us it was only 2.9km to the guard post. Did it, however, tell us where the path was? The path that would enable us to get through the forest and to the post before nightfall? The path that I had been unable to follow in daylight let alone pitch blackness? I wanted to turn east along the forest edge, Jak opted for north-west. As I had got us into this mess I decided not to argue and to follow him. Of course, he was right. Consequently, I was secretly delighted when he failed to notice the tree with big leaves and I could call out “here it is” as we crossed the right track. That was Tuesday evening. We were in the field until Friday…last week was a long one!
This morning we attended a meeting organised by the local forestry department. They are creating “An Inventory of the Potential for Non-timber Forest Products” in the local government district. Non-timber forest products, or NTFP, as they are referred to in conservation jargon, are an often used argument for the protection of forests. Local people for millennia have exploited NTFP and although their impact on the local environment and wildlife may be debated, in comparison to bulldozers their impact on the forests was negligible. Therefore, we consider NTFP a valuable tool in protecting the forests and we are pleased that the local government is taking this initiative (see the photos below showing various examples of NTFPs).
Fruit picking
Making rattan baskets
Rattan Baskets
Other craft products This week I’ll have my own opportunity to assess the sustainability of NTFP. I’m off into the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve until Friday. A pleasant round of investigating reports of farming inside the reserve, plantation expansion on its border, and an assessment of activities on the western edge. Hopefully, I’ll see an orangutan or two. I’ll write again when I get back on Friday or Saturday.
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