For years, Susi knew only a life on the end of a chain. Kept as a pet in Pontianak, the young orangutan spent years tethered by the neck, the metal cutting so deep into her skin that the wound had become infected and foul-smelling by the time she was finally rescued in 2011. Even after the chain was removed, fragments of rubber remained embedded in her flesh, a lasting mark of everything she’d endured.
What followed was five years of patient rehabilitation at an Orangutan Conservation Centre in Ketapang, relearning the skills a life in captivity had denied her: how to climb, forage, and simply be an orangutan again. In 2016, Susi was finally released into the protected forest of Gunung Tarak, on the edge of Borneo’s rainforest.
Four years later, in the midst of a global pandemic, came the moment that made it all worthwhile. Field teams monitoring Susi discovered she’d given birth to a healthy baby girl, later named Sinar, only the second baby orangutan born into the wild.
Since then there have been a further eight wild births recorded from previously rescued and rehabilitated orangutans: proof that an orangutan who once knew nothing but suffering and confinement can heal, adapt, and build a wild family of her own. For a Critically Endangered species, every birth like Sinar’s is a reason for hope.
