A day to stand still for a moment and reflect on our intelligent fellow primates that are still facing such an aggregate of threats to their survival in the wild. We all know the depressive statistics on habitat loss, fragmentation of their remaining jungle areas, continued hunting, poaching and smuggling and now, just starting, what promises to be the worst El Nino in human history… No number of soccer fields per minute disappearing or percentages decrease in remaining number of orangutans can express the seriousness of what every single one of them is facing. I saw mothers starving and dying while trying to hang on to life in degraded forests. And flying extremely low over the Mangkutup river in the Central Kalimantan burning peat swamps, in thick smoke by helicopter, I saw the flames consuming the last trees on the river edge burning and a huge cheekpadder orangutan in a burning tree dropping himself in the water to his certain death, so much like the people in Hawaii that had no place to outrun the fires.
It is a terrible thought that the survivors of those terrible 1997/1998 fires and equally disastrous fires of 2015/2016 will now, just like the local people, again hardly be able to breath and escape the flames. We will need to anticipate many new rescues. Odom, whom I entrusted setting up the BOSF Nyaru Menteng center near Palangkaraya in 1998 was out in the field for months during 2015/2016 and in that period he and his team tracked, captured and relocated 89 adult orangutans from the peat swamp fires. We have no idea how many more perished. This picture of Odom in action tells more than pages of text can.
As always we will do our utmost to save as many orangutans as we can but the fight cannot be won on the local level alone. We need to deal with international wildlife smuggling and global climate change as a result of human activities. It needs to be a global effort. Perhaps this year’s super El Nino will be the shocking wakeup call we badly need to jump into real action? Honestly, I don’t know, but what I do know is that giving up is not an option!
Willie Smits
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