Jungle Rescue: Saving the Orangutans

Willie Smits is on a mission to save the endangered orangutan. It's a straight vine from its survival to ours.

 

The seaside marketplace was crowded with women in sarongs and headcloths, haggling over piles of tropical fruit and dried fish. But a much rarer commodity caught Willie Smits's attention one humid day on the island of Borneo. "Good morning, mister," a vendor called out, thrusting a wooden cage into the biologist's face.

"In between the slats, I saw these horribly sad eyes," Smits recalls. They belonged to a young orangutan, her body emaciated and her features slack with misery. Though Smits ran a forestry research station on the island's east coast, he had never come face-to-face with one of the creatures. As he moved on, he couldn't shake the feeling that a red-haired child, ill and abused, needed his help.

That night, he returned to look for her. He found the little orangutan dying of dehydration on a garbage heap, where the vendor had tossed her after failing to find a buyer. Back home, he spent 24 hours feeding her diluted milk and cradling her in his lap. When she was out of danger, Smits named her Uce (pronounced "oo-cheh"), for the gasping sounds she'd been making when he rescued her.

Two decades later, Smits, 51, has saved more than 1,600 orangutans, gentle and highly intelligent great apes now classified as an endangered species. They're threatened by smugglers who capture them for the black-market pet trade in Indonesia and abroad, by diners who consider orangutan meat a delicacy, by shopkeepers who sell the animals' skulls as souvenirs, and by loggers who are decimating their jungle habitat. Smits's organization, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), takes in orphaned or displaced animals and resettles them in protected rain forests. This month he will release 96 orangutans—his biggest graduating class yet.

One thing Smits's work has taught him is that our fate is inextricably tied to the orangutans'. Certain varieties of wood sold at American lumberyards are illegally harvested from the animals' home turf; the vegetable oil in many processed foods comes from palm trees planted where jungle once grew. The razing of the forests, in turn, contributes to global warming and thus to droughts, floods, and other disasters from Alaska to Australia.

"Protecting orangutans," Smits tells anyone who will listen, "is the same as protecting people."

Orangutans are our closest evolutionary cousins after bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, sharing 97 percent of their DNA with humans, and they're like us in many other ways. They make tools, using sticks to crack open fruits. They can be taught to understand hundreds of human words. Children live with their mothers for eight years, learning to navigate the jungle and distinguish between harmful and useful plants. Babies like to be tickled, reacting with silent laughter.

But orangutans are far less adaptable than humans. The largest of all arboreal mammals, they need vast, unbroken stretches of forest to survive in the wild. An orangutan spends its days foraging in the branches for food. When the trees go, so do the tree dwellers.

Once found throughout Southeast Asia, orangutans are now confined to isolated areas of Borneo (whose land mass is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A century ago, their estimated population was 315,000; today, 50,000 remain.

The son of a farm laborer from the Netherlands, Smits showed an affinity for animals early on. "I ran away from home when I was one and a half, and they found me sleeping on the belly of the meanest guard dog in the neighborhood," he says from Washington, D.C., where he's visiting from Borneo to lobby the World Bank for funds. He planned to study veterinary medicine in college but found the classes dull. Wandering into a lecture on tropical forestry, he was hooked.

Smits went on to earn a doctorate in the subject. He traveled to Indonesia for graduate work in 1980 and soon settled there, marrying a princess from a tribe in Sulawesi; he and his wife have three sons. He also established a reputation as a brilliant ecologist, developing highly regarded rain forest conservation techniques.

Then the orangutans came calling.

 

In the fall of 1989, two weeks after Smits saved Uce, he got a message from an employee of the Indonesian forest ministry. The man had heard about the rescue and wondered if Smits would take in another ailing orangutan—a young male who'd been found in the jungle after his mother was killed. Forestry workers had named him Dodoy. Smits nursed him back to health, intending to send both orphans to a rehabilitation center.

But such programs, Smits learned, had problems. Most of them released rescued apes as soon as possible. The animals often clashed over territory with their wild counterparts, infected them with human diseases, or simply starved. Some experts called for a new strategy: Quarantine the rescuees and treat them for contagious illnesses, teach them the skills they need to survive in the wild, and release them in a patch of protected jungle with no existing orangutan population.

Using those principles, Smits decided to start his own rehab center. After numerous corporations, nonprofits, and the Dutch and Indonesian governments turned him down for funding, he brought Uce and Dodoy to an assembly at the international school his children attended. The faculty and students embraced Smits's vision—"Willie could sell salt to the sea," says Peter Karsono, an Indonesian teacher who later helped run BOS-and launched a fund-raising campaign. The students collected $5,000 through bake sales, sponsored walks, and appeals to their often wealthy parents. After an oil executive matched that sum, Smits had the seed money he needed.

Next he had to convince local villagers, most of whom belonged to Borneo's Dayak tribe, that protecting orangutans was better than killing them for their meat and skulls.

Smits traveled deep into Borneo's backcountry, where rivers were the only roads. Entering one tribal longhouse, he found a baby orangutan cowering near the half-eaten carcass of its mother. "How can you do this?" Smits shouted in the local dialect.

As the warriors reached for their blowpipes, Smits realized he'd made a potentially dangerous blunder. He switched tactics.

"Do you like lahung?" he asked, referring to a jungle fruit.

The Dayaks nodded. He listed several other indigenous fruits and asked if he could buy seedlings.

"They're very rare," a tribesman said, explaining—as Smits knew—that the seeds of many native plants would sprout only after passing through an orangutan's digestive tract.

"So do you think your children will be able to keep eating these good things," Smits asked, "if you kill all the orangutans?"

There was a pause. "I stopped hunting them," one man suddenly declared, tears streaming down his cheeks. "I shot at one and thought I'd missed. When she came down, I thought she was going to attack me. Instead she laid her baby at my feet and fell dead. After that, I couldn't do it anymore."

Others chimed in with stories of encounters with friendly orangutans. Smits shook hands with his new allies. Then he climbed into his motorboat and took his sales pitch to the next town.

 

The Wanariset rehabilitation center opened in 1991, staffed mostly by Dayaks. Soon they were caring for dozens of orangutans, many turned in by sympathetic locals. Smits expanded his mission, pressuring the Indonesian government to crack down on the illegal pet trade and helping officials track down smuggled orangutans. He was eventually named adviser to the minister of forestry.

But he faced monumental resistance as well. Owners of domesticated orangutans—who often give the animals candy and cigarettes and cage them when they grow too big—protested the rescue effort. Some spat at Smits when he arrived with the authorities to confiscate their pets. He received hundreds of anonymous death threats. His house was burned down, his dog killed. His wife fled with their sons to her hometown on the island of Sulawesi, where she was elected deputy mayor. (His wife and oldest son still live there, and Smits sees them as often as his work allows.)

Despite his dedication, Smits's work was doing little to slow the decline in the orangutan population. Illegal logging had increased, the palm oil business was booming, and the two often worked hand in hand. After loggers cleared a swath of jungle, growers would burn the stubble to make way for palm plantations. "Hundreds of orangutans were coming out of the forest, burning alive," Smits recalls.

The deforestation brought flooding and water pollution to many Dayak villages. The carbon dioxide released by the vanishing jungle made Indonesia the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. And as the planet warmed, Borneo's remaining forests sickened. In the past, great flowering cycles took place every four years, spreading a bonanza of seeds. The last one occurred nine years ago.

Smits opened a second rehab center, in southern Borneo, but he realized that saving individual orangutans wasn't enough. So in 2003 he launched his boldest project yet: growing a new rain forest, designed as a refuge for orangutans and a model for a new kind of human community. He chose the wasteland surrounding the town of Samboja, where ground once shaded by jungle was now carpeted with alang-alang—a wild grass that emits cyanide, preventing trees from growing. The wildlife had disappeared, and the few people left were mired in poverty and disease.

BOS bought 5,000 acres and hired local workers to clear away the grass and plant a million trees. Samboja Lestari—"Samboja Forever," in the local dialect—was designed as concentric circles. In the middle is a nearly mature forest, home to a growing number of rescued orangutans. On the periphery are plots where 650 human families can grow fruit and sugar palms, the sap of which will be sold for use in sweeteners and bio-fuels. (Unlike oil palms, sugar palms thrive alongside native plants.) Samboja Lestari is also the site of a lodge for ecotourists and a satellite transponder station serving the European Space Agency, both of which help pay the project's expenses.

Residents of the area earn wages doing reforestation work, send their children to a BOS-run school, and get free building materials if they choose to live on their plots. In return, they're responsible for policing themselves: If anyone is caught harming an orangutan or a tree, his neighbors must decide the penalty. So far, there have been no transgressions.

Outside the perimeter, "we're working very hard," Smits says, "but we're not solving the problem."

When he grows weary, it helps to hike into the forest where he released Uce in 1992. She lives there with her youngest male offspring, Matahari, whose father is Dodoy, Smits's second rescuee. (An older male, Bintang, has grown up and left the nest.) When Smits calls Uce's name, she clambers down from the treetops. "She hands me her baby and hugs me," he says.

Smits recently shot a video of mother and child playing on the forest floor. Though orangutans can't speak, they communicate eloquently by other means. In the film, Uce stops for a moment and looks up at her human friend. Her smile is broad and warm, and that tells Smits everything he needs to know.

 

Want to help the orangutans? Find out how here.

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-Borneo has 45,000 orangutans, down from 60,000 in 1996. Sumatra has 5,000, half the '96 number.

-Borneo's 287,000 square miles were once almost entirely rain forest; now half are.

-For every orangutan captured for the pet trade, five die in the process.

-The population shrinks by 6,000 per year, and the animals could be extinct by 2020. •