Branching out:
Wild Work: Sumatra finds that the Indonesian island’s orangutans are skilled home builders with a flair for interior design. Kerry Harvey reports.
A look at the bed-making skills of orangutans.
If you think making the bed every day is a chore, be grateful you’re not an orangutan. These fascinating primates have to construct new sleeping quarters every night. “You watch a wild orangutan make a nest and it just blows your mind – they are so quick,” says Auckland Zoo primate keeper Amy Robbins, who reveals that some of the creatures are also closet interior designers. “There’s a real knack making the nest because they don’t snap the branches all the way through. They just fracture them and that enables them to weave them into other leaves and branches. “Some different cultures will adorn them with different accessories or particular species of leaves. “You wonder when you see them how this bunch of leaves can hold a 100kg animal way up in the canopy. It’s quite amazing.”
To learn more, you can watch Wild Work: Sumatra which follows Robbins on a trip to Sumatra to check out how the Auckland Zoo Conservation Fund is helping orangutans, elephants and the ecosystem on the Indonesian island.
Robbins acknowledges most people probably aren’t aware just how involved the zoo is in conservation both in New Zealand and overseas, including the Pacific Islands, Africa, several parts of Asia and Nepal.
“That’s at the heart of everything we do at Auckland Zoo. We are dedicated to building a future for wildlife and this (series) helps to tell that story,” she says.
“It’s really just making people aware we do more than just take care of the animals in the zoo – and we do an amazing job of that, better than any other zoo in the world, I believe – but also that conservation is what we do.
“We take our role as kaitiaki of both the zoo and the wider environment very seriously and telling these types of stories just helps to drive that message home.”
She hopes Wild Work: Sumatra, which follows on from the popular Zoo Tales, will lead to other series.
“There are so many stories that we can tell ... watch this space.”