A few months back we purchased a piece of land adjacent to the centre. An excavator was brought in to make this area into a 6.7 hectares island. Our volunteer group has been working incredibly hard building feeding towers and bridges around the island and erecting over 400 wooden poles for an electric fence. There is still a little work to do before we move any of the orangutans onto it, but we plan to move some of the advanced juveniles from forest school for the next stage of their rehabilitation. They will stay on the island and receive supplementary food while they continue to improve their forest skills.
Another exciting development for our IAR staff is that the new office building is now ready at our Sungai Awan site. This is quite a milestone as it means that the staff are now all together at the centre. Needless to say this has made communication much quicker and easier between the admin, clinical and carer teams, plus we no longer have to rent buildings in Ketapang town to work from.
