The Wildlife Rescue Unit (WRU) of the West Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA), together with our partners YIARI and local group Yayasan Palung, rescued a baby orangutan in Durian Sebatang Village, Seponti Jaya District, North Kayong, West Kalimantan, on Saturday 5th November.
There was no sign of the baby orangutan’s mother. It was the first time in almost two years that there had been a case of this nature in the area. Reports indicated that a local man had found the baby on 31st October. The villager, named Saiko, claimed to have found the little orangutan in an area being cleared by a forestry company in the Sungai Bulan area in Sebatang Durian Village.
Saiko, a fisherman, said that he found Mawa beside a pile of branches felled by loggers. After waiting for two hours to see if the mother appeared, Saiko took the baby orangutan to his house. On learning from another villager that orangutans are a protected species and it is against the law to keep them, Saiko informed the authorities of Mawa’s existence. On receiving this information, the relevant team carried out a verification and then set off to pick up the baby orangutan.
The joint team departed on Saturday morning and on arrival, IAR Indonesia’s vet examined the baby and confirmed that he was a male orangutan of about one year old, suffering from dehydration and malnutrition.
Mawa was placed in quarantine at the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in Sungai Awan, Ketapang District where he was to be kept under observation for eight weeks. During this time he would also undergo further medical examinations to make sure he wasn’t carrying any diseases that could be infectious to other orangutans or people in the centre. He will spend years in rehabilitation at the centre in order to learn all the skills he will need to survive in the wild – skills that he would normally learn from his mother.
Argitoe Ranting, Head of Programmes at YIARI, said: “We are really concerned to find a baby orangutan being kept illegally, particularly because there have been no cases reported during the past two years. The mother of this baby must have died because no mother orangutan will leave her baby alone until the infant is six or seven years old. It looks as though there is more work for us all to do in order to increase public awareness of this issue and prevent it from happening again.