UBC scientist details efforts to rehabilitate orangutans in Indonesia
A University of B.C. researcher is sharing her experiences helping run a “jungle school” in Indonesia that rehabilitates orphaned orangutans and releases them into the wild.
Jacqueline Sunderland- Groves spent eight years with the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, founded in 1991 to deal with the large numbers of orphaned and illegally held orangutans in need of rehabilitation.
“A lot of what we do focuses on rescuing orangutans in areas of conflict, oil palm plantations, areas that were burned, areas that have had habitat disturbances, but also rescuing infants found in villages,” she said.
Sunderland-Groves, now a research scientist with the UBC faculty of forestry’s Wildlife Coexistence Lab, gave a talk about her experience running the foundation at Vancouver’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum on Sunday.
It takes about six to eight years for an orangutan to graduate the foundation’s “jungle school,” depending on how young the animals are when they come in, she said Friday.
“The baby starts baby school and then goes up to forest school 1 and forest school level 2,” she said.
“Between the ages of six and eight, they become very strong … and that’s when they progress to naturally vegetated areas or prerelease islands.”
The school teaches the great apes the skills needed to survive in the wild that they would normally have learned from their mothers, Sunderland- Groves said.
That includes how to climb trees, which foods to eat and which to avoid, how to build night nests and how to avoid predators. Staff teach by example, which helps the young orangutans learn.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, about 70,000 orangutans remain in Borneo, Sumatra, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Sunderland- Groves said the biggest threat to the animals’ habitat comes from the clearing of land for palm oil plantations, with conflict and forest fires adding to the problem.
The foundation has two centres in Indonesia, housing about 550 orangutans.
Since 2012, the organization has reintroduced 378 of the apes into the wild.
A successful reintroduction is one where the animal survives for a full year in the forest, Sunderland-Groves said.
This means the ape has learned to adapt to all the seasons by foraging for other vegetation at times when fruit is less plentiful in the forest.
While Indonesia is on the other side of the globe, Sunderland-Groves said it’s important for people in Canada to care about these creatures because they share 97 per cent of the same DNA as humans.