This article is part of a series of journal entries by Natural Encounters Supervisor, Amanda Daly, on her recent trip to visit the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project in Borneo.
21 May 2009: Our First Wild Orangutans
Crack!
“Did you hear that?” It was the heat of the afternoon, the worst time of the day to see wildlife, and Martina and I had retired for a post-lunch nap to our room at the guest house of Danau Girang Field Centre.
Crack-thwack!
I did hear it. “Maybe Ian’s home.” A bird researcher named Ian Vaughan, the only other occupant of the four bedroom cabin, was rarely there and, in our previous dealings with him, had not seemed prone to making loud cracking noises.
We decided to go check it out.
Thwack! At first the sounds seemed to be coming from a bedroom on the other side of the cabin but, as we headed that way, we heard a loud Crack-crack! Smack! from the small sitting room behind us. We looked at each other, eyebrows raised. The sitting room was empty.
Macaque through window screen. Photo by Martina Stevens.
Crack! We looked up in unison. The sounds were coming from the roof. Outside the screened windows lining the back of the cabin, the trees were full of long-tailed macaques. Now, unlike silver leaf monkeys and proboscis monkeys, long-tailed macaques are widespread in Southeast Asia and relatively common around the Kinabatangan River. Most of the residents and researchers get about as excited about a long-tailed macaque as a Houstonian gets about a squirrel. But I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching these scrappy monkeys. Their slender gray shapes weaving in and out of the trees, they crashed from branch to branch as they made their way toward a fruiting tree that stretched high over our cabin. Crack! The rowdy monkeys were dropping fruit and pits on the roof. Mystery solved.
Martina and I were more than happy to give up nap-time to snap photos to watch the macaques negotiating with each other for the best foraging spots. Periodically, one of them would notice us moving behind the window screens and would pause, surprised, trying to see inside.
After about an hour, Benoit showed up with his head of facilities, a Malaysian man named Zainal, to plan some work at the cabin. We surrendered the living room to get ready for our evening boat trip to look for wildlife on a nearby ox-bow lake.
A few minutes later, Benoit called us back. “Listen.”
Phoebe and Pisang. Photo by Min Poh.
And I heard a sound I knew well from my days as a primate keeper but that was, for me, completely out of context in a forest: the high squeals of an irate baby orangutan. These were followed closely by the low gutteral utterings of a placating adult. We couldn’t see them so we hurried outside to the back of the cabin and peered through the foliage at our first wild orangutans, just a few yards away, a dark red female with her baby, about a year and a half old, a bright ball of fluff. The ball of fluff was having a little bit of a meltdown.
We were soon joined by practically everyone in camp, maybe ten people including Marc Ancrenaz, the Scientific Director of Hutan and the visionary behind the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project. Based on years of experience observing wild orangutans, Marc interpreted the scene. The mother orangutan was trying to make her way through the trees and underbrush to the fruiting tree over the cabin but the baby was justifiably alarmed by the twenty-odd macaques scattered across the intervening space.
Phoebe and Pisang. Photo by Min Poh.
Rachel Henson, one of two Danau Girang research assistants, put some names to what we were seeing. The two orangutans tended to visit the field center about once a month. They had named the mother “Phoebe” and the baby, a little female, “Pisang,” Malay for “banana.” The tree attracting all the wildlife was locally known as sengkuang (Dracontomelon costatum). We picked up one of the unripe fruits the primates had allowed to fall to the ground, a marble-sized pit, covered by a thin layer of fruit and a tough brown skin. It tasted like lemon.
As we watched, Phoebe moved a short distance from one sapling to the next, about twelve feet up from the ground. Pisang whined shrilly in protest. Phoebe turned back, croaked comfortingly, and held her hand out encouragingly.
“She’ll cross there,” Marc predicted, pointing to a thick branch arching over the undergrowth separating the orangutans from the sengkuang tree. He was right. We watched as they made their way, Pisang gradually calming, the scary macaques having backed off somewhat in the face of the crowd of human spectators.
Soon the spectators faded away in their turn, returning to their own pursuits and eventually even Martina and I decided to return to the cabin and let Phoebe eat in peace.
But the forest held one more surprise. We heard a crunching sound, as if someone was outside crushing cans. We went back to the windows in the sitting room to find that the clean-up crew had arrived. A handful of bearded pigs, so named because of a row of white bristles running down each side of the snout, were milling around under the sengkuang tree, wagging their tails, happily munching the unripe fruits, pits and all, dropped by the primates. The macaques had returned in force and were moving around over the pigs with their characteristic lack of subtlety. Phoebe and Pisang stayed out of sight high above the cabin in the sengkuang tree.
- Amanda Daly, Natural Encounters Supervisor
