Matang Wildlife Centre – Week 1

Howdy all,

I suppose this is the first post in about a week or so, sorry about that but I don’t have the net at the orangutan centre.  Just to foreworn you, this is going to be a long post, so unless you have a bit of time on your hands then you might want to leave it until later!

So myself and the other 9 volunteers transferred down to Matang on Monday morning.  Everyone is pretty cool, I’m in a wooden chalet thing with an ex copper, nice bloke, plenty of interesting stories to tell!  It is quite a mixed group actually, 4 guys and 5 girls ranging in age from 18-50, not what I was expecting really but definately better for it.  Matang is about 30k away from Kuching, on the boundary of Kubah national park.  Mostly kerangas secondary rainforest everything is very thick and green (except the numerous leeches who mill about who are brown!), once you trek off for a minute or two unless you know where you are it would be incredibly easy to lose yourself in there.  The centre is a rehabilitation project for numerous animals (infact they are oblidged to take in any endangered/totally protected species within reson).  Currently there are 6 Orangutan, 2 female babies, 3 girls about 6-8 years old and one big 17 year old male.  There are 8 sun bears (the smallest of the bears) a bunch of crocs and samba deer, macaques and a few other species.

I guess the easiest thing to do is to go through the last week chronologically and intersperse it with general bits of trivia!  So we started gently on Tuesday, had a guided tour around the centre and through the rainforest nearby that we are working in.  Facts galore about bears, plants, insects, the centres work, orangutan (obviously!) and the crocs.  The centre itself is in about the stage of repair that I thought it would be.  A couple of the enclosures are not great, particularly the crocs but they are much better than they could be thanks to all the volunteers.  The big sunbear enclosure is great, plenty of space for them to roam around and climb (once they are ‘taught’ to, interestingly sun bears in the wild generally occupy the top of the canopy as that is where most of their food is, however none of these bears have been in  the wild and are not able to climb more than a 2 metre at the moment if at all), the orang enclosures are also plenty big enough with frames for them to climb etc. 

Wednesday was the first day we started properly.  The group was split up into 3 who in the morning to do husbandry (cleaning, feeding etc) for the quarentine area, orangs or the sun bears on a rotational basis.  First day I got put with the orangs, not a bad way to start.  Spent about half hour cleaning out Amans enclosure (the dominant male), every step of the way he was watching us from the night den, sitting near to him you realise just how big and powerful orangs really are.  Amans hands are massive, he weighs 150 kilos and is able to do ONE fingered pull ups, Arnie eat your heart out.  Unfortunately he got into a fight with another male at Semengogh (another rehab centre) and lost one of his fingers as well as half of his tongue.  Because tourists persist in throwing lit cigarettes to some of the animals he also has around 15 burn marks on his lips, not that you can see them very well.  We were then introduced to Doris.  Doris is 7 years old and loves humans, she has been humanised to the extent that rehabilitation and release is looking less and less likely.  Going into her night den with Leo we sat down next to her and began to feed her by hand, it was unbelievably cool.  She is a real girls girl and loves guys, so she came straight up to me and offered me a banana, so I took a bite and gave it back to her, she won’t eat unless she sees you swallow what she gives you, it means you eat some seriously dodgy crap!  It was an amazing experiance.  Later that day I went up to the training area where mamu was having her first ever day in the forest!  She had climbed so high that she was scared to come down, quite common in young orangs apparently.  Because she had never been in trees before she didn’t know whether they would support her or not, meaning that it took a long time for her to move about.  Ting San was also with us, they really are like little kids, wanting attention, to play or sulking because they did’t get what they wanted.  She kept grabbing me from behind and trying to pull me over, wanting a cuddle or just to wrestle around a bit.   Eventually we got Mamu down from the trees and had to prise her off the rope and into a portable cage as she is too scared to be walked or carried through the forest.  It really is silly just how cute baby orangs are! The pictures below are of Ting San, I didn’t get a chance to get any of Mamu, but I have got some video I will try to get up at some point.

On Thursday I did the quarantine area.  Again the mornings are all about husbandry, cleaning and what not.  A pretty easy job all told, except when you are trying to remove a banana plant from Amans cage!  There are 2 baby macaque between 1 and 2 years old who are brilliant.  They love grooming the hair on your arm and generally playing with you, this is why they are very big in the pet trade, until they turn older and generally get a bit nasty, a fully frown macaque has quite a set of teeth on him!  The afternoon consisted of digging holes in the forest about 3 foot deep for a fence to surround the new deer enclosure.  I tell you what it was bloody hard work, stupidly hot and not to mention thick tree roots everywhere you looked that you had to hack through.  Generally we start work at about 8am and finish around 5 with a 2 hour break for lunch (the locals are a bit like the Spanish!), hard work but enjoyable. 

Today I moved onto the Sun Bear.  We spent an hour painting marks on the trees so that we can monitor how high they are climbing now that we can begin to ‘teach’ them, about 3 metres up each tree.  So far the highest one of the bears has gone is about a metre and a bit, so considering they are meant to be 60 feet in the air there is a lot of room for improvement!  The food delivery people had not arrived that morning, so we didn’t actually have any food for the bears save some seeds and the odd bit of fruit, this isn’t so bad.  It teaches them to go without food for a while, exactly as they will when they are released into the wild, although that is a few years away yet.  Sun bears may look cute (again big in the pet trade when they are young), but they are viscious, their bite and large claws are definately something you don’t want anywhere near you.  When we let them out they started fighting….because there was no food.  Gummy bear (so called because when someone owned him as a pet, they removed all his teeth with a pair of pliers so that he couldn’t bite anyone) kicked off at the dominant female.  The sound of those bears going at it is seriously scary, they are the one animal you can hear no matter where you are in the centre.

So this weekend we are back in Kuching (we get the weekends off) and just kicking back relaxing.  Sorry about the rambling nature of the post, trying to remember everything that has happened in the last week is impossible, not to mention explaining it in a way that doesn’t just use the words ‘fantastic’, ‘unbelievable’ and ‘amazing’ over and over again!  I think I will only be posting once a week until I leave but i’ll try and make it a bit more interesting to read next time!  A regards to the photos, the internet is really really slow over here so I have had to reduce the quality A LOT to upload a couple of them just so you can get an idea.  There are many more and much better to look at than these (especially the bears!) that will be up just as soon as I can.  

I may write something a bit more constuctive before I go back on Sunday, but for now that is it, after 1500 words! Hope everyone is well.

Sampai jumpa lagi xx