Episode 3 Orangutan Diary

Last time on Orang-utan Diary...

Ellie, our little orphan, was settling into life at the centre.

Meanwhile, her playmate Grendon was a little nervous on his first trip into the forest.

You're frightened, aren't you?

There was sad news from the nursery,

where one of the infants lost its fight against the flu virus.

With everyone concerned about more orang-utans getting sick,

it was fantastic to see Lomon taking his first steps to recovery.

But it was the most recent arrivals, a starving mother and baby,

that brought home once again, the sad plight of the orang-utan.

The Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation

cares for rescued and confiscated orang-utans.

More than 450, from babies to mature adults,

have found a safe home at the centre.

Many are the victims of deforestation.

Forests are cleared to make way for massive plantations.

If things don't change, wild orang-utans could be extinct within 10 years.

The centre is working almost at capacity,

but it does all it can to care for, educate and return orang-utans to the wild.

Steve has come to check up on the mother and baby,

rescued from the edge of a palm oil plantation yesterday.

We're hoping there's been some improvement.

SHE SQUEAKS AND GRUNTS

She's looking a lot better.

It's a totally different picture from when she first came in.

SHE SQUEAKS AND GRUNTS

This behaviour, this kiss squeaking, as it's called...

HE MIMICS THE SQUEAKING NOISE I can't do it.

That's all a defensive response to feeling slightly threatened,

and obviously scared still. It's important that she continues that,

because she's going back to the wild, so we don't want to tame her or make her used to humans.

'Rescued from the wild with its mother to cling to,

'this baby is very fortunate.

'Their bond will last for up to six years -

'six years of love and learning.

'Sadly, orphaned babies are the most common arrivals at the centre,

'confiscated from people keeping them as illegal pets.

'Yesterday, when a second mother and baby arrived,

'it was hoped they too would be soon well enough for a quick return to the wild.

'But despite the best efforts of Lone, Michaela and the others,

'things aren't looking at all good for the baby.'

It's incredible how quickly things can turn around for these little babies.

Only yesterday we were saying

that at least this one has come in with its mother.

As long as it can stay with its mother,

and its mother can keep feeding it, it stands a very good chance

of being put straight back in the wild

and not having to go through rehabilitation.

Things have taken a horrible turn.

This morning, this baby was found on the floor of the cage...

..very weak and beginning to go cold.

You only have to look at this little baby to know that it's...

it's really not in a good way.

'Everything that can be done is being done to help this baby.

'The centre has excellent veterinary facilities

'and four fully-qualified vets.

'An increasing problem for the centre is the number of animals arriving with broken bones.

'Tragically, some of these injuries have been caused by people.

'This six-year-old male has a nasty fracture that's not healed properly.

'Unfortunately, the one piece of equipment the centre doesn't have

'is an X-ray machine.

'When the chance arrived to borrow one from a neighbouring charity,

-'we took it straightaway.'

-OK.

They've already got some really interesting X-rays in.

If I show you this one...

This is one of the mothers that has come in.

You can see this bone has been broken here. It's all in a mess.

If you look here, there's these white specks as well.

The only thing that can be is bits of metal,

which makes me think that it's actually been a gunshot wound.

This orang-utan has been shot in the arm here

and it's smashed this bone.

Thankfully it seems there is evidence of some healing there

and the vet said when they felt it, it seemed to be fairly stable.

It's gonna be a few months before that completely heals.

It goes to show how useful having X-rays and X-ray facilities here would be.

Saving an endangered species has high points and low points and...

it's definitely nothing lower than losing a little baby.

SHE SIGHS

For me, seeing a baby orang-utan lose its fight for life is of course deeply upsetting.

It's difficult to hide my emotions, but it's important to remember

that there is still hope for so many other orang-utans here.

One special character who always seems to cheer me up

is little Lomon.

'He's really benefiting from all the care and attention.

'Only yesterday, he started eating and drinking properly for the first time.'

-Do you want some of this?

-Hey! Are you sharing your lunch?

Yeah, look at this! This is Lomon. Can you believe it?

-Well, yeah! We can see his bald head!

-He's not difficult to spot.

-But it's amazing. Lomon was just not eating.

-Yeah.

Now he's eating my leftover lunch!

THEY LAUGH

It really is. He just seems to have selected what he wants to eat.

-He looks like...

-This he clearly likes.

Look, he loves the noodles in my soup. D'you want that?

I bet you he gets some of his own before he takes that.

-That's my bet, anyway.

-OK, let's see.

-OK.

-SHE LAUGHS

-Yay, I won!

Yay, there you go, you won.

What's amazing is he's obviously getting over the psychological trauma he's been through.

The next stage is to fatten him up a bit.

-He seems to be...

-He's on...

-..quite enthusiastic about that.

-Yeah.

He is. He's just... I think, it's just...

being very gentle around him. God knows what must have happened to him

to make him so cautious, so sort of...scared, really.

-You know the other really good thing?

-What?

-His hair's growing back.

-It is, isn't it?

-Look at that! He's got little tufts of hair coming.

He'll look a bit more like the rest of them soon, hopefully.

People would look at this orang-utan and think,

surely it should be eating fruit,

cos that's what it eats in the wild.

But is it just because he's so underweight,

anything he eats is better than nothing?

Mammals are fantastic at knowing what they're lacking. He will have an inherent ability

to find foods that are actually what he needs.

Humans are similar. Sometimes you crave protein. You think,

I want... You have to listen to your own body, and that's what he seems to be doing.

Every time he's offered food, he turns his nose up at it,

and then he'll go off and bimble about and say,

this is what I want, which is exactly what wild orangs do.

They take what they need and explore interesting sources of food.

-I've got a craving for chocolate, you haven't got any, have you?

-No.

SHE LAUGHS

-I'll leave you with him.

-See you later.

-I'll go and check on the other guys.

You want some juice?

I'm back in Forest School One

to check how my mates Ellie and Grendon are getting on.

Lessons were going well,

but we've been surprised by an unwelcome visitor.

This is Derry.

As you can spot, he shouldn't actually be in School One anymore.

It's actually been five years since he was here,

but this is where he was trained.

It goes to show that he's learned quite a bit as well,

because he's managed to escape from the area where he should be

to make his way all the way back.

It's actually when you see one of these really big guys in the trees

that you understand this is the biggest tree-dwelling animal on the planet.

It's a great example to these little guys

the way he uses all that body weight to trapeze himself from tree to tree.

The distraction seems to be putting lessons on hold for the time being.

While Derry seems to be enjoying throwing his weight around,

our little ones do need to be careful.

He doesn't know his own strength, and his games could result in Ellie and Grendon getting seriously hurt.

SHOUTING

THEY CONTINUE TO SHOUT

She's far too close for comfort.

Understandably, the sitters want her down.

SHOUTING

He's still hanging around, but he seems to be moving from our babies,

which is a good thing because since he turned up,

they've been very reluctant to spend any time in the trees at all.

Hopefully, that's the last we'll see of him.

Hello, Mr Lomon.

Up you come.

'Little Lomon's improvement has surprised everyone.

'He seems to be putting all the mistreatment he received in captivity behind him,

'and at last he's well enough to take his first trip into the forest.

'Lomon is joining up with one of the groups from Forest School One.

'He'll soon begin lessons in finding food,

'and hopefully start climbing some trees.

'Let's hope this is the beginning of Lomon's road to recovery,

'and the start of a promising school career.'

It is so good to see him like this.

It wasn't that long ago that he was so poorly,

I thought it was touch and go whether he'd make it.

He was so weak, so thin and so disinterested.

That's the thing... Sometimes, some of these orang-utans

who've been through such a trauma in their lives,

sometimes they just give up the will to live,

and it doesn't matter how much love and attention you give them,

you're not gonna magically make them want to live.

He seems to have grasped his second chance now.

Derry, the intruder, has been safely removed from Forest School One.

While Ellie and Grendon recover from the excitement,

I'm taking a trip deeper into the forest to check out their future secondary school.

This is Forest School Two.

This is big school. There are 53 orang-utans in here of various ages.

All those lessons that they learned in Forest School One,

this is where they're put into practice. Come on!

HE GROANS

This is one school run where you do need a 4x4.

The orangs seem to have a much easier time getting through this stuff than we do.

Some of them haven't bothered touching the ground at all.

These guys have just moved in the canopy, all the way,

occasionally dropping sticks on us, just to lend a bit of encouragement.

Oooh! Come on, guys.

-LAUGHTER

-Guys, there's something very warm

-appearing on my foot.

-What you need is another one,

then you'll have a matching pair of very orange furry slippers.

THEY LAUGH

Come on!

'It's another call-out for the rescue team.

'An orphan baby orang-utan is being held in a village

'right on the edge of a palm oil plantation.

'It's illegal to keep orang-utans as pets,

'so we're gonna join up with the authorities

'to confiscate the baby and bring it back to the centre.'

Wow, look at this.

This is the beginning of the palm oil plantation.

This isn't actually where we're doing our confiscation from,

but this is the sort of place that rescues happen all the time.

You can see the forest has just recently been cut down.

That's what you can see all at the side.

Goodness knows how far back this is going to go.

This is just the beginning of this plantation.

It'll go deep into the forest, and as they cut the forest back,

orang-utans and other animals are being pushed back, back and back,

and eventually, there'll be nowhere for those orang-utans to go.

You look at something like this,

and it's very easy to wag a finger at the wrong people.

To me, this is consumerism at its worst.

A lot of these plantations are owned by wealthy foreigners.

Indonesians, a lot of the time, don't benefit at all.

Some of them have lost their homes, others are paid very poorly and have poor working conditions.

Where does the demand come from?

A lot of the time from people like myself

and people wanting cheap products in supermarkets.

This is the sort of scene you see all over Borneo.

This is the biggest problem for orang-utans here.

We're on the last leg of our journey.

What condition the little orphan orang-utan will be in when we find it, nobody knows.

What we do know is that it's being handed over voluntarily.

We're finally here. This is the house the orang-utan is.

There's procedures when you do these sort of things, so we've come with the police

and we've also come with the chief of the local village.

This is the orang-utan that we've come to collect.

Oh, it's tiny! It's tiny!

It's absolutely weenie.

Hello, sweetheart.

Hello.

He's wondering what on earth is going on.

Well the story as I understand it is that this little baby

was found in a field that was being burnt so that they could grow crops.

The dogs started barking and they found this little one.

The mother was nowhere to be seen. Nobody knows what happened to her.

So this particular story, it looks like they didn't want it as a pet, they just found it.

And then have kept it.

BABY ORANG-UTAN GRUNTS

'It's coming up to feeding time in Forest School and there's a mood of expectation amongst the orang-utans!'

The main difference between Forest School One

and here in Forest School Two, is that the baby-sitters are no more.

It's all male technicians, and they're not here to cuddle and look after every need of orang-utans.

They're here to supervise them, feed them and generally check that they're OK.

Oh, obviously with this number of orang-utans in... Ow!

..in one place, you have to be a little bit careful that you don't get bombarded from above,

but also that they're all fed.

These guys are provided with two big meals a day.

They'll happily eat every variety of fruit and veg that's served up.

In the wild their food is far more difficult to come by,

so they can't afford to be fussy eaters, and are known to eat up to 400 different things!

All of these orang-utans are around the age that if they were still with their mothers,

they'd be getting much more independent,

they'd be spending more and more time away,

but yet still totally aware of where their mother is.

And the thing is that it's the same for these guys.

They do seem to be bimbling off into the woods on their own,

but they're all consciously, sort of, keeping an eye on where the technicians are,

when the next food supply is coming in and this sort of thing.

Forest School is a bit like a halfway house,

as these orang-utans are halfway through their rehabilitation.

As they get more confident, they start to spend the night in the forest alone,

learning to make their own nests and developing real independence.

It's wonderful to think that next year Ellie and Grendon should be over here, making nests of their own.

In the village, it looks like the captive baby orang-utan is finally about to be handed over.

When someone has voluntarily given up an orang-utan,

it's done in an official but very friendly way.

Papers are signed, educational material is given out,

even some T-shirts are handed over.

Education is obviously so, so important.

These that people who live on the river, they don't know the orang-utans are really endangered.

They don't know that they need protecting.

THEY SPEAK IN LOCAL DIALECT

It's name is Dina, Dina.

Hello, Dina!

Dina is a female, we've found out, and has been kept here for about six months.

So she's been six months without her mother

and without love and affection that she should be getting.

Oh, she wants to get back into the cage!

Well, that was a very easy confiscation.

At last she's freely handed over.

Her world is about to change - and change for the better.

'We need to get her back to the centre as fast as possible -

'get her checked out and quarantined,

'then straight into nursery where she'll learn to become an orang-utan.'

Once feeding time is over in Forest School Two,

the orang-utans head for the trees.

So I've come back to join my mates Ellie and Grendon for their final lessons and the home run.

The lesson we're about to do now is to show our little troop that fruit does indeed grow on trees.

In my hand I have our ready-made fruit tree

and see if we can encourage our little babies up the tree.

So here we go!

Aggis is a very clever orang-utan.

No, you've got to leave some for the others! Look at that!

Now do you see that?

My particular favourite Grendon,

I don't think is the sharpest tool in the box, unlike the girls.

But I'm sure he'll rise to the challenge.

STEVE GENTLY ENCOURAGES ELLIE

Nanda's taken the aerial route so she might actually come down this tree to get some fruit.

Good girl!

So it's two-nil to the girls, Grendon.

See, Aggis is laughing at you.

STEVE LAUGHS

Ah, make the most of it, why don't you!

Come on, come on.

Good lad, good lad.

You dropped it.

I don't believe it, you dropped it!

What sort of orang-utan are you? Come on.

Huh!

Quick, get that before Aggis robs it all. Come on, come on.

Seeing them all in tree together actually, is, um...

might look a bit artificial, but funnily enough

when you get fruiting trees producing masses of fruit,

that is where you will get a lot of youngsters all together

and it's a chance in the wild for them to socialise with each other.

It's one of the only times that orang-utans will come together.

WOMAN SHOUTS IN DISTANCE

Oh, it's having a baby.

We've just heard that - one of the...

Yep, one of the orang-utans is having a baby.

Quick, quick!

It's coming out now.

BABY SQUEALS

There it goes, that's it. That's it...

Give her some time.

Good girl, well done!

Well done!

Good girl. BABY ORANG-UTAN SQUEALS

Good sound - that's what you need.

That's it.

INDISTINCT SPEECH She is, yes.

With the birth of any animal, I always think it's best not to interfere

unless you absolutely have to.

It's important that mother and baby learn about each other and bond as quickly as possible.

Come on, girl, that's it.

She'll sort the umbilical cord out herself.

It's got good movement already and it's a good sign it's vocalising.

BABY ORANG-UTAN SQUEALS

Good girl.

She's doing well, she's doing very well.

Yes, but the baby's lying with her neck right on top of that thing.

She's doing absolutely fine. Absolutely fine.

-Have you ever had any kids?

-Nope.

-Neither have I...

-Exactly!

Don't worry...

She'll sort it, she'll sort it.

She doesn't know quite how things work out yet.

It's amazing to see a newborn animal cling so tightly,

obviously, and it makes perfect sense if you are going to be born 100ft up a tree!

That's it.

She's so gentle.

And she is doing really well.

She's bonding with it, cleaning it.

You're always worried they're going to leave it in the corner of a cage

and not know what they're for.

She's doing really, really well.

That's a definite first. I never thought I'd get to see that.

It's such a privilege to see a newborn baby orang-utan,

and with its mother to look after it and plenty of care and attention from Lone and her team,

this baby should have a fighting chance.

Only time will tell.

Next time on Orang-utan Diary:

It's a special day for Zorro, the big male.

He's given his first taste of freedom after 13 years in a cage.

Lomon has a testing time as he starts his first lessons in Forest School One

and emotions run high as we battle to save

yet another orphaned baby orang-utan.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

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