Early orangutan researcher Galdikas announces new "cruise expedition"

Birute Galdikas with young orangutan. Photo: Irwin Fedriansyah

John Bordsen, travel writer for the Charlotte Observer, published on July 3 a brief interview with Birute Galdikas about her work with the orangutans of Borneo. Decades ago, Galdikas was one of three women sent by famed anthropologist Louis Leakey to research the world's great apes: Jane Goodall pioneered the study of wild chimpanzees and Dian Fossey pursued wild gorillas, both projects in Africa. As a young woman, Galdikas took off to Borneo (tropical island in Southeast Asia) to study the natural behavior of orangutans in their native forests. For a summary of the research of all three woman, see Sy Montgomery's excellent book Walking with the Great Apes.\ Another great read, about a North American journalist's search for Birute Galdikas on Borneo, is A Dark Place in the Jungle by Linda Spalding.

I visited Indonesian wildlife markets; illegal sale of baby orangutans rampant

Fossey was killed on site in Africa (by poachers?), but Goodall and Galdikas have maintained a lifelong commitment to chimps and orangutans, respectively. At some point during her career, Galdikas' forest research morphed into rescuing orphaned orangutans, as the forests of their native islands have been plundered by timber interests and the palm-oil industry. Mother orangutans are often killed when they're in the way of commercial development, in fact are often killed to obtain their offspring. A baby orangutan can bring tens of thousands of dollars in the blackmarket pet trade. I learned that, first hand, while posing as a tourist in the illegal wildlife markets of Jakarta last summer. I was offered a baby orangutan in the Jakarta market of Pramuka, although more often orangutan sales occur in backwoods and sequestered locations to avoid any risk of prosecution. For more about the specifics of my interactions with traders, see my post: Laws flaunted: flourishing pet trade threatens orangutans's survival

I traveled through Borneo and Sumatra last summer investigating...

the conservation efforts for orangutans, whose numbers are dwindling as their habitat disappears. I was astonished at how much of the tropical forests of these lush islands is already gone. So sad, because these Southeast Asian islands have been among the most bio-diverse sites in the world. More posts, and pix, from my travels in orangutan habitat:
My search for wild orangutans on Borneo and Sumatra
Hunting may threaten orangutans even more than habitat loss

Galdikas' 10-day expedition for tourists next year

Anyway, early next year, Galdikas will lead a 10-day "Indonesian Interlude" cruise expedition to two of her research stations in Borneo (see Orangutan.Travel.or Fronteirs.Elegant Journeys to learn more about the trips).

Protecting apes and other wildlife

Trapping, shooting, eating, and selling wildlife are long-held traditions in forest cultures. Solutions must involve enforcement of local laws protecting forests and wildlife, and enforcement of penalties. That's something that's not happening right now in developing countries. But it must if orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, tigers, and thousands of other species are to survive this century. Many organizations are busy, on site, trying to make it happen. In Southeast Asia, TRAFFIC and Greenpeace are working hard to turn things around.

What can you do?

Support some of the NGOs who are making the most progress in protecting orangutans from illegal hunting and trade and who are fighting to protect Southeast Asia's remaining forests from destruction. And working to rehabilitate orphaned orangutans.

These are some of the best:

Orangutan Outreach
Greenpeace International
TRAFFIC: the wildlife trade monitoring network
ProFauna (an Indonesian NGO that helped me in Jakarta by providing a local guide to go with me to the markets)
Sumatran Orangutan Society
World Wildlife
ForestEthics
Rainforest Action Network
Earth Pulp and Paper

Some of my previous posts on conservation in Southeast Asia:

Orangutans dwindle as Borneo, Sumatra converted to palm-oil plantations August 3, 2010

My search for a wild orangutan in Borneo and Sumatra August 16, 2010

Laws flaunted: flourishing pet trade threatens orangutans' survival August 23, 2010

Wildlife trade rivals drug trade in profits September 20, 2010
Tiger in a suitcase - an isolated incident? September 26, 2010
Why use toilet paper? No need to flush our forests October 11, 2010

Some of my previous posts on wildlife smuggling around the world:

Monkeys and parrots pouring from the jungle. September, 2008
The U.S. imports 20,000 primates per year. February, 2010
The great apes are losing ground. March, 2010

Some of my previous posts about deforestation:

Orangutans dwindle as Borneo, Sumatra converted to palm-oil plantations August 3, 2010
Wild tigers are in trouble October 4, 2010
Plush toilet paper flushes old forests. September 26, 2009

Keywords: orangutan orphans orangutans poaching Borneo Sumatra Galdikas 10 day expedition Indonesian Interlude Camp Leakey deforestation palm-oil industry

Orangutans dwindle as Borneo, Sumatra converted to palm-oil plantations

Text and all photos by Sally Kneidel, PhD.   

 A mother orangutan cradles her baby tenderly, at a forest refuge in Borneo. Photo by Sally Kneidel.

I've wanted to visit Indonesia for years - it has more tropical rain forest than almost any other country. Only Brazil has more. Indonesia is a nation of more than 13,000 islands, including Borneo, Bali, Sumatra, and Java. Although crowded and impoverished, Indonesia is a biodiversity hotspot, home to tigers, sunbears, elephants, rhinos, and best of all, orangutans. The biggest draw for me are the orangutans.

Orangutans were common on Borneo and Sumatra at one time, but their populations are shrinking fast due to massive deforestation. Even in areas where they still survive, orangs are elusive and hard to spot. So when I finally made that trip to southeast Asia a couple of months ago, my hopes of seeing orangutans weren't high.  I had to give it a try, though, before the red-haired apes are all extinct.  I also wanted to understand the challenges to their survival - the forces driving deforestation, and the illegal wildlife trade that's rampant in s.e. Asia.

Poverty and overpopulation are major causes of habitat loss and wildlife poaching in Indonesia - around half the population lives on $2 a day or less. When jobs are scarce, a hungry family can make good money selling timber or trapping wildlife illegally for the pet trade, food, traditional medicines, and research labs. According to Interpol, the trade in wildlife and wildlife parts is the 3rd most lucrative blackmarket in the world, just behind drugs and arms.

I saw plenty of poverty in Indonesia and in Malaysian Borneo (the northern part of the island of Borneo is Malaysia, the southern part is Indonesia).

 

Above, Indonesian children begging for money in the street.  Photo by Sally Kneidel.

Above, a woman fixing dinner for her children in a coastal town in Borneo. The beached boat is their home. Photo by Sally Kneidel.

Indonesia surprised me
Indonesia surprised me in a lot of ways.  I was stunned at the paucity of wild birds in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra...until I visited the bird and wildlife markets in Jakarta (the capital of Indonesia). Nearly every town in Indonesia has a wildlife market. A shocking number of species are for sale in these markets, both legally and illegally.  Most of the birds for sale, crowded into small cages often without food or clean water, are wild-caught ordinary songbirds, comparable to bluebirds, robins, or chickadees in the U.S.  They aren't birds like zebra finches and parakeets that will breed in captivity. Most vendors in the wildlife markets have a stall or kiosk, but I saw lots of men without stalls just wandering around the markets with a freshly-trapped bird in a small paper bag, or a monkey in their hands, trying desperately to find a buyer. Trying to get me to buy their captive, so they could buy dinner for their families or pay their rent or whatever. It was heartbreaking.

 A baby macaque for sale at Barito wildlife market in Jakarta. Photo by Sally Kneidel.

Orangutan conservation is complicated
I was surprised too at the variety of efforts to both protect and make money off of orangutans.  Often those two efforts conflict.  Ecotourism is definitely a good thing, because if communities can make money catering to tourists who want to trek through the jungle or look at wildlife, then the locals have a financial incentive to preserve the forest and wildlife rather than sell the timber and animals or convert the forest to palm-oil plantations. The conflict stems from the fact that tourists want to see orangutans up close, so they can take pictures. But orangutans and other primates don't normally come close to people unless they expect to be fed.  The problem with feeding is that orangutans, being closely related to humans, can and do easily pick up our diseases, and can transmit those diseases to their entire forest population.  I visited the full range of orangutan-viewing opportunities, from totally wild and never fed, to places where some visitors were able to hold orangutans on their laps.

The palm-oil nightmare
Yet another surprise, for me, was the palm-oil industry. I knew that most of Borneo's forests have been converted to palm-oil plantations. But it didn't really sink in until I flew over the forests of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java and saw that at least 70% of the ground below was palm plantations. Those areas don't support wildlife. And the rain forest that remains is in small fragments, most of which are too small to support breeding  populations of any vertebrates other than rodents and lizards.

Palm-oil plantations stretch to the horizon, as seen from an airplane over Indonesia. Photo by Sally Kneidel.

 An emerging market...is that good?
Indonesia is a big country, almost as broad as the United States. Globally, it ranks 4th in human population, behind China, India, and the U.S.  Not surprisingly, Indonesia has recently been listed as an "emerging market" by Dow Jones and various other financial institutions. Other "emerging markets" include India, China,  Malaysia, Brazil, Peru, South Korea, South Africa, and many others. The fact that Indonesia has been categorized as an emerging market means that it will be attracting even more international investors.  That could be a good thing. But in the case of Indonesia, I imagine it means more extraction industries - international corporations that harvest/destroy the country's national resources and send the profits to international shareholders.  I fear it means that even more of the country's forests will be converted to the lucrative palm-oil plantations.  That scares me to death.  A large number of "charismatic megafauna" species will inch even closer to extinction - the orangs and various other primates, the elephants, rhinos, tigers, sunbears, etc.

Women on the island of Bali, Indonesia, carried back-breaking loads of soil to a construction site for 12 hours a day. Photo by Sally Kneidel.

What's the solution?
In several posts to follow, I'll explore these issues in more detail. I'll tell you everywhere I stayed on my trip, with contact info, and all the orangutan sanctuaries and forests I visited. I'll show you my clandestine pics of the wildlife markets of Jakarta, pics of wild orangs and other primates, as well as the landscapes, the cities, and the beautiful people of Indonesia. And I'll tell you what I learned about orangutan conservation - what's working, what isn't, and what you can do (from home, or as a visitor to Indonesia). I'll review the conservation organizations I learned more about, such as ProFauna Indonesia, BOS (Borneo Orangutan Survival), Traffic, and (SOS) Sumatran Orangutan Society. What does it mean to live on $2 a day? The issues are complex. The future seems challenging for Indonesia's people and daunting for their tropical forests and wildlife....but not hopeless.

Key words:  Asia Borneo orangutans Indonesia palm oil plantations deforestation southeast Asia Sumatra Malaysia ProFauna Pramuka Jakarta $2 a day poverty Bali ecotourism rainforests wildlife trade traditional medicine

Great apes losing ground

This post now on Google News on BasilandSpice, a syndicated website

Text and photos (except gibbon photo) by Sally Kneidel

  Myself (Sally Kneidel) with a young orang in grad school at OU, while a student of Roger Fouts'

Southeast Asia a center for illegal wildlife trade
I'm going to Indonesia soon, to write about the current plight of orangutans who are losing their habitat. And to learn more about the illegal trade in wildlife, especially endangered primates.

If you regularly read the website of "Traffic: The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, you know that southeast Asia is the epicenter of the illegal trade in protected wildlife. The Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok is said to be the single largest market on the planet where wildlife is traded illegally. That's one place I'm going.

New study finds endangered gibbons threatened by pet trade
I do read Traffic regularly and spotted on their website this morning a link to a recent article from the journal  Endangered Species Research, a study of the trade in seven species of gibbons native to Indonesia. All seven of these gibbon species are listed as Endangered by the IUCN, meaning that all are at very high risk of going extinct in the wild. All are protected by Indonesian law and can't legally be kept as pets.

Gibbons, courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org

The researchers for the ESR article I mentioned above reported on 600 gibbons found in 22 zoos and 9 wildlife rescue centers and reintroduction centers from 2003 to 2008. About 2/3 of these animals had been confiscated by Indonesian authorities from persons keeping or trading them illegally. About 1/3 were animals donated by pet owners who grew tired of the gibbons as they aged and were no longer cute pets. The article reported that prosecution of offenders is rare, and so the trade in gibbons and other endangered primates such as orangutans remains rampant.
 
Traffic published an excellent overview of the ESR gibbon article on Dec 7, 2010, on the Traffic website.

Both gibbons and orangutans (also highly endangered) are Great Apes, the animals most closely related to humans. (Other Great Apes include chimpanzees and gorillas.) What animals could be more deserving of our protection, or more interesting?

The illegal pet trade grows more significant as species dwindle
The main threats to most primates are loss of habitat and hunting, but as their numbers decline, the illegal trade in primates is having an increasing impact on the surviving populations. This trade is driven not only by pet owners, but also by demand from biomedical companies and zoos. I recently wrote a post in which I reported that the country importing the most primates is the United States, largely for medical, pharmaceutical, and other research. Many or most of these are wild-caught primates, because wild-caught are much cheaper than those bred and raised in captivity. And most research is paid for by grants, so researchers shop frugally for their experimental subjects.

But the primate pet trade is thriving in the United States too.  If you doubt it, take out a subscription to Animal Finders' Guide, or attend one of the many exotic animal auctions held across the U.S. every year, such as the infamous "Woods and Waters." Animal Finders' Guide advertises these auctions, but the weekly publication is mostly pages of ads selling wildlife, from lions to camels to primates, including chimpanzees. Selling them to anyone who'll pay. Stunned when I read my first copy, I called a man selling a young chimp from his "backyard compound" in Texas. He assured me I needed no papers, offered to drive the chimp halfway to deliver it to me. I don't remember exactly how much he was asking, but I think it was $25,000.

Many of the animals for sale in the United States arrive the same way drugs do: by boat, by private plane, in the trunks of cars. I went to an animal market in Peru that offered baby tamarins, marmosets, night saki monkeys, sloths, baby spider monkeys for sale to anyone who would buy.

A baby spider monkey for sale illegally in a market along the Amazon, photo by Sally Kneidel

An indifferent policeman plays with a baby sloth for sale illegally, photo by Sally Kneidel

The price of these endangered and threatened wildlife in that market by the Amazon?  The equivalent of $2 each. Many were sold as pets; keeping primates as companion animals is still quite popular in the villages of remote Amazonia. Some families had a baby marmoset for every child in the family, as well as turtles and iguanas that they dragged around on rope leashes.

A teenage girl in an Amazonian village with a pet marmoset, photo by Sally Kneidel

Check out my previous post about the Amazonian wildlife market, and my previous post about the popularity of wildlife and primates as pets in Amazonia - both posts with lots of pics.

What can you do?
Support organizations such as the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), which manages a 1 million acre reserve that is home to 3500 wild orangutans. BOS is committed to rescuing orangutans displaced by the ongoing destruction of their remaining habitat for palm oil plantations.

Support Orangutan Land Trust, an organization affiliated with BOS. I know the people who manage BOS and OLT, and I know they're making a difference.

Support  SOS, the Sumatran Orangutan Society, an organization working to protect the Sumatran Orangutan.

Support TRAFFIC, an organization committed to informing the public about all species threatened by loss of habitat, hunting, and illegal trade. TRAFFIC has been around for a long time, and is associated with WWF.

I don't know much about Kalaweit, but just looking at their website, they appear to be an organization working to protect and rescue gibbons in Indonesia.

Sources:
Vincent Nijman et al. October 13, 2009. "Saved from trade: donated and confiscated gibbons in zoos and rescue centers in Indonesia." Endangered Species Research (http://www.int-res.com/journals/esr/esr-home/)

See also:
Traffic. "Study highlights gibbon trade in Indonesia" Kuala Lampur, Malaysia.  12/7/2009.

David Adam. "Monkeys, butterflies, turtles... how the pet trade's greed is emptying south-east Asia's forests."
guardian.co.uk The Observer Feb 21, 2010.

Some of my previous posts on these topics:
Monkeys and parrots pouring from the jungle..

U.S. imports 20,000 primates per year

From the Amazon to the Andes, Peru knocked me silly

Keywords: gibbons orangutans red apes Orangutan Outreach endangered animals southeast Asia BOS Borneo great apes