Tune into Orangutan Diary for Episode 2

[Guest guest]

Tune in tonight for the second episode of Orangutan Diary on BBC1 at 7pm.

“Michaela Strachan and Steve Leonard present a series featuring orphaned and

rescued orangutans in Borneo. They help babies Lomon, Grendon and Ellie learn

how to behave like wild orangutans. It's a tough job - six years of love and

education that their mothers would have provided in the wild. Lomon is one of

the weakest orphans of all, and when a serious virus starts to spread at the

centre, Michaela fears that he may not survive.”

From the Times today:

The future’s black for orangutans

The long-haired apes of the Borneo and Sumatra rainforests are rapidly being

driven to extinction by loggers in pursuit of palm oil riches. Penny Wark

reports on a desperate rescue operation

However disturbing the statistics on the destruction of the rainforests in

Borneo, watching it happen is infinitely more shocking, says Steve Leonard. “The

speed at which the diggers flatten everything is unbelievable. It goes from

being a lush green forest, cool and noisy, just this amazing variety of life, to

it looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off.” And with it the last remaining

habitat of the orangutan is instantly and brutally removed.

Leonard, the wildlife television presenter and vet, was in Borneo to film

Orangutan Diary, the BBC’s record of the conservation work being done to support

the threatened species, which is on every night this week. As the UN environment

programme report, The Last Stand of the Orangutan: State of Emergency, says, the

rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra are being cleared so rapidly that by the early

2020s they are likely to have vanished. This means that unless urgent action is

taken, their most charismatic inhabitant, the orangutan, will be extinct within

five years.

The culprit is the palm oil industry which is responding to the worldwide

enthusiasm for what is often described as vegetable oil. Its green credentials

are impeccable: it can enhance a healthy diet, as a biofuel it can reduce carbon

emissions, and its ubiquity in such products as margarine, cereals, soaps and

shampoos makes it an important cash crop for Indonesia. But as the Government

hands out permits for palm oil plantations – and illegal loggers remove valuable

timber in most of the national parks – little is being done to protect the

displaced species, Leonard says.

“A huge area of Borneo has been deforested already and there are millions of

species possibly going to be lost – beetles, birds, other primates, mammals,

reptiles – the whole lot, and the scale and speed of it is unbelievable.

Whenever the companies were doing clearing operations we’d go to one of the

plantations to help rescue some of the orangutans.

“They spray everything with herbicide, so you’ve got this scorched earth. They

pile the remaining trees and everything into two big hedges – and who knows

what’s underneath them. All we could see were birds thrashing in the sky in

distress as their homes were destroyed, and you’re looking between your shoes

and you see beetles crawling away with nowhere left to go. Every time I returned

to the same spot in a plantation, within a matter of weeks the forest is on the

horizon again, a 20-minute drive away. We have to start shouting about it

because this area is going to disappear.”

The other focus of Leonard’s attention was the Borneo Orangutan Survival

Foundation, a rescue and conservation centre set up by Lone Droscher-Nielson, a

Danish former air stewardess who gave up her job ten years ago to save the

species. The Foundation’s aim is to rescue as many of the orangutans as

possible, and ultimately to return them to a protected area of the wild.

Some are literally plucked from the forest as the bulldozers move in. But the

problem of conserving them is exacerbated by the illegal trade in orphan

animals: they are kept as pets and often illtreated. There is no census of how

many creatures have been lost to deforestation, but it is estimated that for

every orangutan that is rescued, five more have died.

Leonard’s skill with animals and televisual presence was first noted ten years

ago in the BBC’s Vets School. Vets in Practice followed and he has since

travelled around the world with the BBC Natural History Unit.

“I’ve always been fond of orangutans,” he says. “Chimps are a bit too aggressive

and noisy, gorillas are sedate and regal but don’t do a great deal. Orangutans

are inquisitive, there’s a real comedic aspect to them, they are very gentle,

slow moving. But at the same time, because of the nature of the habitat they

live in, they have to be a lot more inventive than their cousins from Africa.

They live in a harsher environment, food is scarcer and they have to rely on

their nous rather than hanging around in social groups where things are on tap.”

So far he has spent nine weeks in Borneo, engaged as a presenter and, in an

unplanned capacity, as an emergency vet. The biggest procedure that came his way

was the removal of the eye of an orangutan called Chenchen. The procedure was

similar to many he has performed on domestic animals in his native Cheshire, but

what surprised him, he says, was the response he got from his patient

afterwards.

“I was able to reach in through the bars of his hospitalisation cage and stroke

his head and have a look. He would pick bits of his bedding out, or bits of

food, and slowly hand them out through the cage to me. Then he’d just want to

hold my hand and it was weird for me to have that very human response in a

patient-doctor relationship.

“It’s all fire brigade work at the moment, rushing in and rescuing and trying to

find new homes. They’re like little orange refugees. They come in under a year

in age, they are nursed back to health and then they’re put through school where

a team of dedicated local women called the babysitters feed them, show them what

plants to feed on in the forest, how to find water – all the things they would

have learnt during their nine-year childhood with their mother.

“There’s a lot of scepticism about whether it’s possible to rehabilitate them,

but it’s not going to be possible if nobody tries. The first wave of

rehabilitation may not work, but every time we do this we stand a chance of

learning more about it.”

This week Leonard returns to Borneo to watch the first of the orphans being

released. “Lone said, you’ll fall in love with one, and for me that was Grendon.

He was a 2½-year-old who was already at the centre, he looked like Homer

Simpson, was about as bright and made me laugh every time I spent time with him

in the forest. The babysitters knew every single ape by name, what they needed,

what they liked, which ones needed a bit more comfort, more food, which ones

liked to be left alone.

“You can’t help but pick up on their different personalities; they really do

have incredibly individual traits. So we get to see these really cute

characters. But there are very sad moments too and we don’t shy away from that.”

Steve Leonard’s Orangutan Diary is broadcast daily until Friday from 6pm-7pm on

BBC One. www.savetheorangutan.org.uk

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1603381.ece

Newsround-Orangutan Diary in photos

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6510000/newsid_6519700/6519781.stm

24 Orangutans to be released this week:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6510000/newsid_6519500/6519513.stm

 

 

 

Michelle Desilets, Director

Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation UK

www.savetheorangutan.org.uk

" Primates Helping Primates "

 

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