The Stories
“When we decided to go to see orangutans in the wild, we didn’t hold particular perception of the orange apes.”
“It takes passion to dedicate your life to a species most people never think about, to fight seemingly impossible battles, and to keep hope alive when the odds are against you.”
In those early days, I followed wild orangutans, learning their ways, observing their behavior. They are the true indigenous inhabitants of Borneo.
“Together, we can share these stories with the world and inspire the next generation to protect the wildlife and the places we all love.”
Conservation is about more than just teaching people what to do or not do, but about reaching their hearts through storytelling.
“When I was a child, we Dayak people hunted orangutans to eat. Our lives depended on nature and we didn't see orangutans as particularly important creatures.”
People were afraid of the very old orangutans, which the elders would call "Ladangan", or "Kandar". I remember hearing an old story about people from the village going hunting, and while they were out in the forest they saw unusual rustling movements in the trees.
“Most injuries are indirectly caused by humans, like starvation due to habitat loss.”
Orangutans can’t tell us what's wrong, and they don’t understand that we’re trying to help them, or worse, they think that we’re trying to kill them. This makes the work dangerous...
“We mustn’t allow ourselves to be duped or succumb to a cognitive dissonance whereby we just switch off from it. We have to care because ultimately it will all come back to us.”
I’m in Indonesia conducting PhD research into whether we can improve the methods for counting orangutans in the wild. Counting them by sighting alone is extremely difficult since they're semi-solitary and just really hard to find, so the way it’s done currently is by counting the nests orangutans make almost every night.
“Donny became part of the family… eating human food, drinking tea, my grandma even dressed him in kids clothes so he wouldn’t get cold. We all slept in the same bed, huddled together…”
The area sold its land to the palm oil companies and the village was devastated by the river mining nearby… It’s so sad to see that I don’t want to even stay one night there.
“We try to encourage people to care about orangutans, but it’s very difficult when they’ve grown up in different environments and have a different awareness.”
Rica is also very sensitive toward my feelings, what I like, and what I don’t. Her child Ricardo would steal my clothes from the washing line and play with them, and even though I never scolded him or taught her to, Rica would always return them back to me.
“You should absolutely never stand between an alpha male and his girlfriend.”
The wildlife stories I grew up with were often pretty scary. My grandfather was once savaged and nearly killed by a sun bear, for example. He kept an orangutan as a pet, which was relatively common in the 1960s.
“We came back to find the orangutan holding the saw, drawing it back and forth over the wood, just like we had been doing.”
Princess was probably the smartest of all. When she was around, you couldn’t tie the canoe to the river bank because she would steal it and paddle it away.
“We were all afraid of the mythical Kandar, a decrepit orangutan that has decayed into a soulless ghoul, like the walking dead.The elders warned us not to stray too far into the forest.”
After high school I moved to a city in Java to study, but I found the noise and chaos overwhelming. When I would come back to visit my home village, among the trees, birds and monkeys, I found serenity, which ultimately led me to return to guide tours and share my love for nature.
“Orangutans are emotional creatures, you can see it in their eyes, but there is nothing we can do to soothe them. Only time can heal their pain.”
My parents worked with orangutans and I’ve been fascinated by them since I was a kid. Now I’m a Ranger and, for us, orangutans are family. We’re here to protect them, their home and, ultimately, prevent them from going extinct.
“If we can attract tourists to see orangutans in their natural habitat, it can help raise awareness and get more people interested in protecting the forest.”
It’s important that children feel connected to orangutans and understand their role in the ecosystem before learning why they need to protect them. We use storytelling, puppets, books, or even dress up in orangutan costumes.
“It’s remarkable how similar they are to human babies. In the middle of the night, they cry out of hunger and we have to get up and feed them milk until they fall back asleep.”
We sometimes rescue orangutans from villages, where people may not even realize that orangutans are a protected species. Once rescued, we take them to our clinic to care for them before releasing them back into the wild.
“I do this job because I am passionate about orangutans and their habitat. It would be difficult to do this kind of work without that feeling in your heart.”
My parents never took me to artificial tourist attractions like Ancol, Taman Mini or other places like that. They preferred to take us to the mountains, to the sea, to natural places. So I was often out in nature, and I felt happy there, I felt comfortable.
“We’ve had pythons try to eat our chickens, and water snakes trying to eat our fish. None of it scares us though, we’ve gotten used to them all.“
We often have monkeys coming by here trying to find food. Crocodiles sometimes come too, like one time where one swam underneath the hut, hit one of the pillars and made the whole structure shake.
Did you know…?
Some of the most intriguing facts we learned about orangutans.
Additional Resources
