Desperately Saving The Last Of Sumatra's Wild Orangutans | 1000 Days

island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Sumatra is home to an extremely rich and diverse wildlife, with over 200 species of mammals and almost 600 species of birds. Its tropical forests and peatlands are a true global heritage, but the fast economic development based on the exploitation of natural resources today is a disaster for the biodiversity of the island. Located in Southeast Asia, Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world. The majority of its lush primary forests have been razed in recent decades, giving way to monoculture trees used for paper and palm oil. Today, in what remains of these lush forests, we still find populations of elephants, tigers, rhinos, and great apes. But all these iconic species are now on the sad list of endangered species. The remaining orangutans struggle to survive the impact of deforestation. The loss of these habitats threatens the wildlife populations, and if nothing is done quickly to stop this massacre, 98% of forests could disappear within 20 years. For economic reasons, the majority of Indonesian land was given in grants to companies that decimate these precious forests to make way for the highly profitable palm cultivation. Palm oil, used in food, cosmetics, and biofuels, the vegetable oil most widely used in the world. The forests in the province of Aceh, in the west of the island, are one of the last refuges for populations of orangutans in Sumatra. Despite protective measures dating from the old regime, the new local government has granted new concessions to large corporations, razing and burning forests to convert them into monocultures. These practices are often illegal, but the government turns a blind eye. In this country, laws are often flouted, jeopardizing the survival of the last elephants, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans in Sumatra. Biologist Bryson Hoyrin, a specialist in arboreal mammals, joins our expedition. I spent a good part of my life in tropical rainforest canopies around the world, in both New World and Old World forests. Now this forest is especially interesting to me because of the orangutan. Our investigation begins at the SOCP Quarantine Center, the orangutan conservation program in Sumatra. In addition to its many research programs, the SOCP collects the victims of deforestation and animals captured by poachers who resell them as pets. Its director, Dr. Ian Singleton, leads a team of nearly 70 employees. By combining science and education, SOCP hopes to improve the plight of the last orangutans in Sumatra. The best estimates that we have today of orangutan population in Sumatra is around the 6,000-7,000 mark, maybe slightly more, maybe slightly less, but the important thing is it's going down. Now in the last 10 years, it's been going down slowly, and what we're looking at now is a potential situation where it's going to start going down rapidly. You know, we're sitting right now at the cusp of potentially a devastating decline in the extent of forests in Aceh and also the orangutans and tigers and elephants and rhinos as well. The SOCP is on a mission to save the last populations of wild Sumatran orangutans, a species critically endangered. Here at the quarantine center, the majority of residents were confiscated from their owners who kept them in captivity, often in inhumane conditions. Upon arrival, the orangutans are examined and treated. The ultimate goal of the SOCP is to release all its residents, but some orangutans will never have that chance. Hey, there you go. Lhosa was shot 62 times with an air rifle. We've managed to take 14 pellets out of him, but he's still got 48 inside, and he's got the problem, his biggest problem, he's got two in this eye and one in this eye, so he's completely blind. If you, yeah, you can see his eyes, there's nothing there at all, and we'll never be able to fix that. So he's going to spend the rest of his life as a captive orangutan, which could be more than, you know, it could be 40, 50 years. Why would somebody shoot an orangutan 62 times with an air rifle? What you have in these farmland areas, you've got people wandering around there with BB guns, and they're, you know, they'll shoot anything that moves, you know, they shoot squirrels and monkeys, anything that they think is going to eat their crops, and I think that's exactly what's happened with him. They've probably run out of pellets after 62 shots. You want to sleep, don't you? You just want to sleep, huh? So, yeah, these cages behind us, they're what we call the long-term cages, so that's especially for animals that we know can't be released, at least for the possible future, and, but most of them, the vast majority, after they've done their quarantine down near the clinic, and we've treated them for whatever ailments they might have, then they move up to these big socialization cages up here, and this is the first time they kind of really start to learn how to be a little orangutan once again. So this is, you know, these are the socialization cages, so this is the first time they've met and been introduced to other orangutans, probably since their mother was killed and they were first captured. So this is where, once they're in here, they have to learn all these orangutan behavioral skills, how to defend their food resources you get, and then you find out who the bullies are, and who the subordinate ones are, and everything else. The aim is to get these groups together, where they're all, they all know each other, and they all know how to interact with each other, and then we always try and get them into groups, so that when they do eventually move to the reintroduction center, they're not traveling on their own, they're traveling with orangutans that they already know, and they're arriving there with orangutans they know, and oftentimes some of the orangutans that are out in the forest there, they also know because they were in here a few months ago, or something like that. So they all will be released eventually? Yeah, everybody in here is a release candidate, we're just waiting. There's, this Saturday, we plan to move six orangutans from here to Janto, to start the release process there, and everybody else is just waiting for their turn. But it's quite a rewarding stage to get them, because these guys have many, many of them spent years on their own, some of them have even spent like 10 years chained to a single tree around the neck with a meter of chain, and to finally get them into a place like this, where they can get really exercised, get to move around, learn all these new skills, it's a really rewarding part of the process. Counting the wild orangutans is a complex task, and the SOCP biologists must travel long distances into the forest to find the nests made daily by orangutans. Often located at the top of trees, it is a daunting task for the patrol. But today, a new technique is being used to better catalogue the Indonesian forests. The drones are equipped with high-definition cameras to photograph or film the canopy, where the orangutans spend most of their lives. This new technique allows the SOCP team to work with great efficiency, unparalleled by ground crews. Drones can also be credited with gathering compelling evidence in the case of illegal practices. We started using drones as a tool here to try to count orangutan nests, to learn more about their distribution and abundance. In the past, we used to count orangutans by doing ground surveys, so we'd go into the forest and go in for a week, two weeks, to go to remote areas and look how many orangutans there are, and if there are orangutans. Now we can fly in with a drone for 10 kilometers, look around, are there nests, and come back in an hour. So once you release this, it's going to basically be flying itself, it's an autopilot. It's an autopilot, so we'll do the takeoff manually, and then we'll do a few rounds to see if everything is okay, and then we'll switch to auto, and then it will fly its mission and return, and then we'll manually land the plane again. Once we started that, we saw the footage and thought that this can be a much more applicable tool than only focusing on orangutans. It gives fantastic information on deforestation, on threats to the forest, on where forest is, what the agricultural threats are, and it gives us, in a way, very high resolution data that we can use to pinpoint where changes are occurring. In their efforts to protect the last wild populations, environmental groups have quickly understood the importance of documenting the logging operations. Drones have now become an effective weapon in the fight to save these last protected areas. The problem is not the oil palm tree. I mean, it's a wonderful, productive plant. The problem is the way the expansion of the industry is happening right now. The droop palm has a much higher yield than soybean or rapeseed. Palm oil is now the most used vegetable oil in the world, and the expansion plans of these monocultures today threatens almost all the forests of Sumatra. The old school plantation industry thought long term. They established a plantation for a hundred years, but the industry currently is being driven by people wanting, basically, double-digit returns in one planting cycle, and I really don't think they care what happens after that. The trees are all cleared, everything is scorched, and 99.999% of everything that lived there dies. You can go into these areas and look for a grasshopper or a lizard, and you can't find one. They're not there. Nothing survives this conversion process. When they're chopping down these forests in the first instance, they don't sort of get every tree on day one, so you end up with a few trees here and a few trees there, and sometimes you find there's an orangutan mother up there. So they will chop the tree down, and then they will jump on this animal and beat it and club it with machetes and wood and bamboo sticks and everything, and it'll be killed that way. Once again, the SOCP team must intervene. An ailing orangutan has been found in a plantation. The wounds sometimes that we see are just horrific. We had one many years ago. She aborted a full-time fetus during the attack, and when we got to her, she was chained to a tree by the neck, and her entire body was swollen up like she'd just done 50 rounds with Mike Tyson. The level of violence you need to do that, just concerted violence, it just amazes me. I find it hard to get it in my head that people can be that vicious. Animals rescued by the SOCP are fortunate, but they only represent a tiny fraction of the orangutan victims of deforestation and poachers. But for others, the majority, it will be death, out of sight, through carelessness and indifference. Wow, wow. So this is the one we got yesterday morning? Yeah. We just got the information from the Forestry Department, and then he stayed with us. He found a big orangutan in the plantation. And the people say the orangutan is just staying in one place and then don't want to moving. And then when try to look in with binoculars, he found a lot of wound there. So this is why the Forestry Department make a decision to take this orangutan going to here. He's got a big scar here. Yeah, this is very big wound there. And this is very deep. And then we found a big hole on the here. And then on the right hand, he cannot use it. And when we try to palpate, the scapula is calm down. So I don't know exactly if this is a fracture or just dislocation. So we will make sure with the x-ray. But it's surprisingly calm, yeah? Yeah. To see this poor creature come in and just look you in the eyes, and they have the most human-like expressions on their face. And it's just wondering, you know, what the heck is going on? What are people doing to me? The first step is to anesthetize the animal. He will then be taken to the examination room, where x-rays will assess the severity of his injuries. Here is an older male. He has not had much luck. His body is covered with bruises and injuries, likely inflicted by plantation workers. Again, the level of violence used reflects the inhumane treatment of these orangutans, who dare to stray into farmland or plantations. The main concern of the veterinarians are Rhea's internal injuries. A comprehensive examination will determine if surgery is necessary. Initial tests confirm that Rhea is in bad shape and that a weapon was used. The x-rays clearly show the presence of projectiles inside the body of the animal. So yeah, this is the head and the skull. You can see there's the one, two, three pellets up there. Three bullets here, one, two, three. I think there's around 18 here. It's kind of weird because they usually focus on the head and they usually shoot him in the face. These are obviously not too far away from his eyes. If they hit him in the eyes, he'd have been blinded. The full examination confirms the severity of his condition and the presence of significant internal injuries. The veterinary team will have to perform several operations and then wait and see how the animal reacts. We observed the surgical procedures that lasted several hours. It was very extensive and I think they're going to have to do more surgery on that animal just to keep it surviving for the time being. After six hours of the surgery, what's the verdict? It looks from the x-rays, there's no sign of any sort of bone damage and so his problem is all these cuts and holes and especially his right hand is completely shot to pieces. The tendons inside the hand is all rotten. You can actually put a finger almost all the way in just about every direction and the tendons seem to be all already rotten so you can pull the ends and make the fingers move so there's a good chance we may have to amputate that but we'll review that over the next few days. So if you have to cut his right arm, is there less chance to be released? It depends on him but he's lived in the forest while and as long as he's sensible, missing a hand probably wouldn't be a major problem. We've already released one big male orangutan with an amputated arm here and it doesn't bother him at all. We'll see. It depends very much on him now. The plight of the orangutan is an eloquent demonstration of the government's inability to protect Sumatran forests and its inhabitants. However, some laws prohibit cutting down forests and conservation areas but local governments routinely turn a blind eye to illegal acts. In the late 90s there was this thing called the Lhosa ecosystem established by presidential decree and ratified by ministerial decree and most of the wild orangutans are in the Lhosa ecosystem so the future of that species really much depends on that area. And then even more recently I think in 2008 the Lhosa ecosystem was designated a national strategic area for its environmental function in which you're not allowed to destroy the environmental function of the area. Now this is being completely disregarded by a new spatial plan established and drafted by the the latest government of Aceh long after the civil war ended that essentially opens up the whole of Aceh's forests including the Lhosa ecosystem for new roads, new mines, new logging concessions, new palm oil plantations and we are terrified about this because the effects on the orangutans is going to be massive. The Lhosa ecosystem is one of the last havens for orangutans. The SOCP and other NGOs have documented illegal deforestation activities in the area of Kripa, a nature reserve consisting mainly of peat lands. They were able to prove that a company producing palm oil had on a regular basis lit hundreds of fires that have killed countless orangutans. A court case was undertaken to condemn this illegal activity. There is no doubt in my mind within the palm oil industry there are better players and worse players and you have a whole spectrum. I'm sure there are companies that you could really say are environmentally responsible, they really are trying to do the you know the better thing and at the far end of the spectrum the other end of the spectrum of course you've got people who really don't give a damn. What we're trying to do is shift the center of that spectrum up towards the better end what we think is the better and more sustainable end of the spectrum. I don't think even expansion of the oil palm industry needs cause deforestation. There are huge amounts of degraded land in Indonesia that could be converted into oil palm plantations without any further deforestation. You know the ministry of forestry has two jobs on this plate. You know one is to maximize state revenue from the forests and the other one is to protect forests and biodiversity. So I think you tend to find that one tends to win out over the other one. And corruption is the other thing. I mean even when you've got a clear violation of the law, evidence, witnesses, sort of an infallible case, it's still a huge challenge to get something like that into the courts and then to achieve a successful prosecution because corruption is just throughout the system. I would say the vast majority of damage being done is not caused as a lot of people tend to advocate poverty. I believe it's caused by greed. People that already have something wanting more. What's most surprising when walking in the plantations is the silence of the forest. A deathly silence reflecting a world without life, artificial, and no future. What's changed then in a hundred years of having all these plantations around? Nothing. The money is in Jakarta. It's built shopping malls and new airport from Medan. It's spent in Singapore. And all the plantations in Aceh, the owners of these, are actually living and spending all their money in Medan. It's not staying in the area. The day has finally arrived for some residents of the quarantine center. Today they undertake the long journey to the reintroduction site at Janto, located in the to allow them to interact with other orangutans. They are now ready to be set free in a protected area where the SOCP brings together survivors of deforestation collected from all over the island of Sumatra. We're lucky when we're setting up new populations because these orangutans come from all over Sumatra, not just one particular place. So actually genetically they would be sustainable and viable because they're from such a varied background. We don't really need orangutans. The journey will last 12 hours in a truck on the road, in 4x4 vehicles on forest roads, or in specially adapted vehicles to navigate the wetlands. Orangutans are always accompanied by veterinarians, thus providing them some comfort during the trip. We also made the journey with them, often in dangerous conditions. The difficulties in accessing the reintroduction site provide some protection for this fragile territory, mainly made up of peatland. Peatlands are deep peat where all the leaves and trees and branches that have fallen into the water have never rotted because there's no oxygen down there, so you end up with this massive accumulation of carbon under the ground, sometimes 6, 10, 20 meters deep, something like that. Now if you actually look at Indonesia, I think Indonesia has something like 56% of all the world's tropical peatlands. The amount of carbon considered to be in these peatlands by the experts was something like 4 to 16 times what's in the atmosphere today. So this is a major issue. If you want to reduce emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, if you can stop destruction of Indonesia's rainforest, and especially its peatlands, you take a huge leap in the direction of your goal. If we fail to protect these, it has major, major consequences for all of us, not just the people here, but everybody on the planet. Hours of travel. The orangutans finally arrived at the reintroduction center at Janto. They will be examined again and enter the final phase of readaptation before being released in the forest. Mission accomplished. Yeah, this is the bit where we actually get to take a breather. Yeah. It's always stressful when you've got the orangutans on the road because anything can happen, like bridges breaking down or getting stuck with a broken axle or something, but once you get them here, they're here, they're healthy, they're in the cages, you can relax a bit. Orangutans tend to just sort of grasp it. Okay, I'm in a box, let's see where I go. Yeah. I hope over the next couple of days we'll see a few orangutans around here in the trees and that's when you get a real kick. So he's feeding, luckily he's feeding them now, but this is kind of fruit and veg that we normally get from the markets, just top up their diet, but once they get here in the Janto release site, we can start actually collecting fruits and other things from the forest, the stuff that they're going to encounter once they're out. So, you know, by doing that they actually get to taste and experience all these things and then they see what their reaction is before they stuff their faces. But I did once follow some orangutans we released in another area and they found these sort of palms that were half fermented and they stuffed their faces on that and probably getting more and more drunk and then they spent the whole night throwing up out the side of a nest, you know. So they've got to learn these things, but at least by just giving them small amounts in the cages they get to sample these things without eating enough to do themselves any harm. And actually while we've just been talking, orangutan has just climbed up on the cage here, has just come up now, she's been out two years. Wow, two years? Yeah, I mean she comes back every few months and she was here a couple of days ago, but she looks really good, I'm really impressed. The aim of the project here is not to just have a few orangutans wandering free and happy again after a traumatic life, it's to set up a wild, functioning, viable population of an endangered species. And any tourism or disturbance or human contact undermines that. We want these animals to be behaving and acting just like wild orangutans, which means up in the trees, feeding, interacting with each other and no interference from humans down on the ground. Several of the orangutans released into the wild are equipped with a small subcutaneous transmitter that allows them to be traced and their progress monitored. Well, it's not really far, eh? No, the signal's about 90, so it means it's somewhere within 100, 200 meters max. But it's difficult to find out exactly where they are because the terrain's quite undulating and the signal bounces around a lot, but we know it's somewhere in this kind of forest patch here. Okay, let's try to find it. Yeah, okay, let's see if we can get close to it. Through that gap. You see him pretty clear, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, just feeling, and then you can hear the fruit drop. Yeah. Usually when you find orangutans in the forest, if you're not using this stuff, it's, you find them with your ears, not with your eyes. You just hear this, as the fruit drops and hits the leaves and stuff like that. And there's a nest right there. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't think she's used that one yesterday. That looks about a week old. It's always nice to see them though, yeah? Because you remember, when you see them like this and you remember when the first time you met, say, Jyoti, and it was in somebody's back garden and skinny and terrified, maybe with a chain around its neck, and then you see them out here like this in the tree, it makes you realize, it makes you feel that what you're doing is really worthwhile. You're really achieving something. Fantastic. And I always get a kick out of it. But not all orangutans are so lucky. At the quarantine center, Rhea is not well. His health is deteriorating, and the medical team must act quickly. So, great day for Reuben, eh? Yeah, in a minute, Luklas will sort of, he'll hang a few bits of fruit on the rope there, try and encourage him to go across, and then the last step is just to open the door. Yeah. And then it's up to the orangutan what he does next. This is what it's all about, yeah? I mean, ever since the first, the orangutans first confiscated in the medical quarantine and patched up and everything else, it's all about this day where the door is finally opened and they have that chance of a second life in the wild, which could be another 40, 50 years or so. Yeah. It's fantastic. The door finally opens for Reuben, an orangutan confiscated from its owners and cared for by Ian's team. It's a great day, a day where liberty could finally triumph. Obviously, a little bit unsure about what he's doing, taking a look around. A lot of them do that, they, you know, the surprise of having the door open is like, ooh, what's going on here? So, they don't just immediately run in for the trees, but they just consolidate themselves for a few minutes and see what's around, see what's where, and then they make a plan. Okay, look yourself out. Oh, yeah. Not very interested in the fruit, more interested in the tree. So, we're very much hands off from the very start. When they come out of the cages, they're not looking for a human contact. They're looking at the trees and seeing other orangutans there and they're going there and they're staying there. There's no difference between these orangutans right now and those orangutans I followed for two years in the swamps. They're up there all the time, feeding very much on the stuff they should be feeding on, and at the end of the day, they made these beautiful nests and went to sleep. Yenny sent me a text. We lost the bug guy. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I didn't make it, but I'm kind of, yeah, disappointed because I was a bit optimistic. I thought when we had a good look at him the other day, he looked like he was still pretty strong. He's been enthusiastic about his food, but I think the injuries that he's got inside are much more than what we saw outside. It's really sad because I thought it was a great, you know, rescue story, you know, but he was eating with good appetite and everything. This is another orangutan dead at the hands of humans, you know, farmers, villagers, just crazy people. When they get an opportunity like that, they just go nuts. Orangutans get killed almost on a daily basis just for nicking a couple of durian fruits or something like that. It's just bizarre. It's completely out of kilter. Crazy. Sad, but we move on. Try and save the other ones. The fate of the last Sumatran orangutan populations depends on the commitment, determination, and passion of people like Ian Singleton and his team. The protection of the last protected forests of Sumatra is of paramount importance to avoid further tragedies such as Rhea. In this unrelenting fight, the SOCP did lose another patient, but the struggle has won an important victory thanks to the support of other local NGOs and the public who responded to the appeal by environmental groups. Over the years, I think many NGOs have realized the value of these social networking systems, you know, firstly websites for getting information out there, but also things like Facebook and Twitter and all the others. Getting information out quickly to a large audience. As a result, we are now able, if we want to launch a quick appeal or request letters or get people to sign a petition like one we did recently on Avaz, to get large numbers of people on board very, very quickly. And the Avaz one in particular, we managed to get something I think as much as 1.3 million signatories within just a few weeks. Every time you sign one of these positions, an email goes to the president of Indonesia, it goes to the governor of Aceh, the head of the forestry, and it goes to all these other, so they hate getting 1.3 million emails. But it also gets picked up by the press. So because of this huge petition, you know, the Guardian, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal, the Sydney Morning Herald, they're all willing to write articles because they know that this is a hot topic. So never underestimate the value of clicking like and share and getting onto these petitions and signing them when, you know, when a cause really is something close to your heart. In a historic judgment, the producer of the palm oil, PT Kalista Alam, was fined $30 million for fires in Tripa, a valuable peatland area in the Losar ecosystem. This victory is perhaps a consolation prize, however, since a new development plan in the forests in the province of Aceh has been adopted by politicians. Envisioned are more companies, more plantations, and inevitably, more innocent victims.