Great Orangutan Project

UPDATE: MY BLOG ENTRIES FROM MY TIME AT MATANG CAN BE FOUND AT THE FOLLOWING LINKS:

https://christandy.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/matang-wildlife-centre-week-1/

https://christandy.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/good-morning-children-are-we-sitting-comfortably/

https://christandy.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/a-quickie/

https://christandy.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/a-long-but-hopefully-concise-post/

https://christandy.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/big-photo-update/

https://christandy.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/all-good-things-update-one/

During February I will be volunteering with the Great Orangutan Project (GOP from here on in), so for those of you who are interested I thought a bit of information wouldn’t go amiss! I won’t go into massive detail as the website explains everything much better than I can. If you want to know more/are a bit bored then give them a visit.

First of all a quick run down of why projects like this are needed. Orangutans now only number around 15000-20000 in the wild, thanks to there slow breeding cycle (females only reproduce every 7-8 years), the population is very slow to recover from any setbacks. Logging is a major threat to the species, especially on the Indonesian side of Borneo where hundreds of thousands of hectares of primary rainforest is being chopped down for exotic wood or turned into cash crop plantations (generally oil palm). Fires started to clear the rainforest for farming also claim hundreds of orangutan lives a year. The poaching of orangutans to either sell on the black market, for food or because they are seen as pests is a prominent problem in many parts of Borneo. Because many tribes don’t have any concept of ‘conservation’ they do not see any problem with this, hence why education has to be part of any successful orangutan rehabilitation project.

The project is a coalition of various conservation programs around Borneo and the Malaysian Peninsular, I’m staying at the Matang Wildlife Centre in Sarawak. By bringing together numerous experts in different fields and working with the local government and population the projects aim is to increase the size and health of the orangutan population. Once the local community and government have the facilities, knowledge and training necessary to continue the project leaders will remove themselves as facilitators, leaving the local community to run the projects themselves.

The GOP successfully completed the worlds first cataract operation on an orangutan in June 2007 on the biggest orangutan at the centre, Aman. Previous to the operation he was virtually blind and was unable to move around much due to his lack of sight. Nowhowever he is able to climb and move around the same as the other orangutans.

The centre has adopted a 3 phase approach to the project:

1. Improve the husbandry and enrichment of the orangutans by building platforms, rope swings, feeding tables and the like to stimulate the orangutans mental and physical well being.
2. Rehabilitation and release of suitable animals into Kubah National Park (adjacent to the centre at Matang)
3. Establishing new orangutan populations throughout Sarawak through the movement of animals from the centre to new locations.

The first phase has been completed and the second phase started which will involve more work in the rainforest to set up suitable locations for the future release of the orangutans into the wild as well as continuing the enrichment of the animals at the centre.

The centre also houses a number of other animals including samba deer, sun bears and crocodiles. The endangered sun bear is the smallest member of the bear family found in the rainforests of South East Asia.