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Mon Dec 10, 2007 11:42am GMT Reuters
By Sugita Katyal

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) – Indonesia launched a program on Monday to save its dwindling orangutan population, the last of Asia’s great apes, from the brink of extinction by protecting its vast tropical rain forests.

Orangutans once ranged the region, but the shaggy brown primate’s population in Indonesia has been decreasing rapidly as its habitat in Borneo and Sumatra has been disrupted by illegal logging, forest fires and the illegal pet trade.

A recent WWF report said climate change would add to the pressure already caused by human-induced activities such as massive conversion of forests into plantations by reducing the orangutans’ food stock. Thousands will be driven out of forests into villages and plantations to look for food.

“In the last 35 years about 50,000 orangutans are estimated to have been lost as their habitats shrank. If this continues, this majestic creature will likely face extinction by 2050,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at the launch of an orangutan conservation plan at the climate talks in Bali.

“The fate of the orangutan is a subject that goes to the heart of sustainable forests … To save the orangutan we have to save the forest.” (more…)

Friday, December 28, 2007 12:49 PM GMT+06:00
by Mohammad Shahidul Islam

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=16762

Primates are considered closest living relatives of mankind. These living relatives — apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates — are becoming rarer from the tropical forest. „Reasons for the decline are no mystery: they all relate directly or indirectly to human actions” says a Worldwatch Institute report. A survey, worked out by 60 experts from 21 countries, cautions that failure to respond to the mounting threats has now been worsened by climate change. On the whole, 114 of the world’s 394 primate species are categorised as threatened with disappearance on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list. Illegal wildlife trade and commercial plant-meat poaching have been largely blamed for their disappearance. (more…)

Many believe the first Orangutan Species Survival Plan (SSP) Husbandry Workshop was long overdue. That said, it may still have been in time to help save wild orangutans.

The workshop, which was staged October 16-18 at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, successfully focused on issues of conservation, habitat destruction, and illegal logging, even as it addressed over 125 delegates largely representing zoos in the United States and Europe. Eight countries were represented, and guest speakers from field projects in Borneo and Sumatra underscored the urgency of the in situ situation.

The Orangutan Conservancy (OC) worked closely with Brookfield Zoo organizers to help identify important topics and speakers. OC chairman Norm Rosen unveiled the organization’s Orangutan Crisis Coalition agenda as part of the program, and later took part with OC vice-president Doug Cress in a conservation forum that included media from around the country.

The OC also received a $5,100 gift from the Brookfield Zoo as a result of proceeds from a silent auction.

The SSP is an Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) initiative that was begun in 1981 to manage the captive populations of endangered species in North American zoos. More than 107 SSPs currently oversee the husbandry of 161 species. (more…)

Wahyoe Boediwardhana, The Jakarta Post, Malang

In the past two years, Unyil, 6, has only been able to exercise by swinging from one rope to another in a square enclosure at the Animal Rescue Center in Petungsewu, Malang, East Java.

It is uncertain how long the male Kalimantan orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) will remain in the eight meters square enclosure.

This is because all of the enclosures in the orangutan reintroduction center in Nyari Menteng, which is about 30 kilometers away from Palangkaraya, the capital of Central Kalimantan, are full — there is no room for any newcomer.

“I heard the center still has about 630 orangutans that have yet to be released into the wild,” Iwan Kurniawan, the coordinator of the Animal Rescue Center (PPS) in Petungsewu told The Jakarta Post in December.

Unyil is one of four Kalimantan orangutans that are still “in transit” at PPS Petungsewu. Besides Unyil, there is 4-year-old Jackson, 5-year-old Boni and 13-year-old Noni. (more…)