Shumaker will discuss his long-term studies regarding orangutan behavior and cognition, and will address the conservation crisis currently facing orangutans in the wild.

Shumaker, who has served on the OC board since 2003, is vice-president of Life Sciences at the Indianapolis Zoo.

The Red Ape Reserve is the new Asian primate exhibit that will house the Oregon Zoo’s gibbons and orangutans in a multi-species enclosure. The three-year project was specifically designed to meet the cognitive and social needs of the apes.

Special OC / Oregon Zoo orangutan-friendly shopping guides will be distributed to commemorate the event.

“The Orangutan Conservancy is pleased to be able to join with our friends at the Oregon Zoo to mark this event,” said OC president Norm Rosen. “We realize than an orangutan enclosure at a zoo in Portland might seem far removed from the issues facing wild orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra, but that’s not necessarily true. Every opportunity we have to speak for the conservation of orangutans in a step in the right direction.”

The Red Ape Reserve premiere will coincide with an Orangutan Conservancy board of directors meeting on August 19 at the zoo.

The Orangutan Conservancy was established in 1999 to support projects that focus on wild orangutan protection; reintroduction; education; and research. Among its recent initiatives are the OC 2010 Veterinary Workshop, which was held last week in Sumatra to raise skills among Southeast Asian staff members at orangutan rehabilitation centers. The Orangutan Conservancy Scholarship funds Indonesian and Malaysian students dedicated to biodiversity education programs.

The Orangutan Conservancy is a partner of the Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP). For more information, please visit the OC website or contact click to email.

Erik Meijaard, an ecologist with People and Nature Consulting International, and colleagues compared present-day encounter rates with collection rates from naturalists working in the mid-19th Century. They found orangutans are much rarer today even in pristine forest areas.

“Whereas some early explorers would see as many as eight orangutans in one tree or encounter three dozen along a river in a single day, today, in the same forests, spotting orangutan in the wild is rare,” Meijaard told mongabay.com via email. The results suggest hunting is taking a toll on orangutan populations.

“Recent interviews of nearly 7000 villagers in Kalimantan [the Indonesian part of Borneo] revealed that over a thousand orangutans are still killed annually by local people, of which more than 50% is for food,” he said.

Meijaard and co-authors Alan Welsh, Marc Ancrenaz, Serge Wich, Vincent Nijman, and Andrew J. Marshall highlight several factors that may have led to an increase in hunting in Borneo, including a particularly unusual one for Northern Borneo: a ban on head-hunting by colonial rulers in Malaysia.

“It remains unclear why hunting pressure would have increased in western Sabah a few hundred years ago. The timing coincides with the approximate end of head-hunting in Borneo, which had kept large parts of the island too dangerous to travel in,” the authors write. “Banks inferred that head-hunting provided wildlife a refuge, because large areas of forest were avoided by hunters fearful of roving bands of head-hunters. He noted that, immediately after the colonial ban on head-hunting was enforced, many forest areas became much safer to travel through, allowing hunters to travel further from villages… Also, it has been suggested that orangutan heads replaced human heads as trophies, which may also have added to hunting pressure on orangutans.”

Looking at data from Indonesian Borneo, the researchers note a correlation between orangutan densities and the distance from villages: more remote forest areas have more orangutans.

The authors write that introduced disease could also be a factor in the apparent decline in orangutan populations, but note there is no evidence to date of epidemics in wild orangutans.

The finding that orangutan densities were once considerably higher leads the authors to warn that the present state of knowledge on the red apes may be biased by a “shifting baseline” scenario: a situation where current degraded conditions are assumed to be the representative of past conditions.

“Insights from our study make us realize how much the population baseline may have shifted,” Meijaard told mongabay.com via email. “There may have been half a million orangutans 150 years ago, and even more before that.”

“Scientists have learned about orangutans by studying them under present-day conditions and densities, but this might be a bit like studying bushmen in the Kalahari to understand the behavior of a New Yorker.”

In other words, everything we think we know about orangutans may be based on incomplete knowledge.

“If our ideas turn out to be correct it would completely change the way we understand breeding, interactions between sexes, feeding habits, and ranging,” he said, adding that conservationists will need to consider these issues in their strategies to protect orangutans, which currently number around 50,000 between populations in Sumatra and Borneo.

“Conservation won’t get us back to the half million orangutans of [19th century biologist Alfred] Wallace’s day, but what should we be aiming for?”

Meijaard says the research also highlights the need to more effectively address hunting as a major threat to orangutans.

“The present study and another one that we still need to publish increasingly indicate that hunting by local people has been and still is a massive threat to orangutans in Kalimantan. Not a single program is addressing that issue though. Why? Is it too sensitive to blame poor Dayaks? Or is it too difficult? Whichever the reason, it is obvious that unless we can address hunting, pretty much all of Kalimantan’s orangutans that occur outside protected areas are doomed.”

(Source: Mongaby.com & OC staff)

The workshop will focus on all aspects of captive orangutan care, with a special emphasis on the detection and treatment of tuberculosis (TB). A joint program between OC and Chembio Diagnostics Systems Inc. provided PrimaTB STAT-PAK test kits to each of the facilities as part of a large-scale tuberculosis study.
The PrimaTB STAT-PAK testing kits are considered useful in the detection of tuberculosis in primates, a severe respiratory disease that can prove deadly.

The OC 2010 Veterinary Workshop is sponsored by the Birmingham (U.S.) chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers (AAZK), a Cleveland Metroparks Zoo Asian Seed Grant, the Chester Zoo, and the Orangutan Conservancy, in association with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Chembio Diagnostics Systems Inc., Murdoch University, and the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program (SOCP).

The OC 2010 Veterinary Workshop will include over 25 participants form the orangutan rescue and rehabilitation centers across Borneo and Sumatra. In addition to presentations, practical demonstrations and roundtable discussions, the delegates will also make a site visit to the SOCP facility.

“We are excited about empowering the orangutan veterinarians in Southeast Asia to better manage their endangered species,” said OC board member Dr. Raffaella Commitante, who is facilitating the workshop.

The OC Veterinary Workshop, which was inaugurated in 2009 in East Kalimantan, Borneo, is the second major capacity development initiative launched by OC recently. In June, OC underscored its commitment to education and capacity development by announcing the Orangutan Conservancy Scholarship, which funds Indonesian and Malaysian students dedicated to biodiversity education programs.

The Orangutan Conservancy was established in 1999 to support projects that focus on wild orangutan protection; reintroduction; education; and research. The Orangutan Conservancy is a partner of the Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP). For more information, please visit www.orangutan.com or contact at click to email.

(Source: OC staff)

The orangutans, which were brought to Thailand through illegal trade, are now being held at the Thai government’s Khao Phra rehabilitation center, about 100 kilometers outside Bangkok.

“We are aware of [the orangutans’] status and we have written to the Thai government offering to share the costs of a repatriation shipment, but they have not responded to our requests,” said Harry Santosa, director of biodiversity conservation at the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry.

Harry said there were no regulations, even in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, on how to return illegally traded species to their countries of origin.

“It seems that if the Thai government agreed to pay [to return the orangutans], it might look as if they had taken part in the stealing of the animals,” he said. “But, if all of the expenses were dumped on us, it would be too expensive to bear.”

Harry said the government had also approached Bangkok with another proposal: a breeding loan. “It’s just like exchanging animals — in return for the orangutans, we would get some animals from them,” he said.

The breeding loan would also eliminate the potentially dangerous need to put the orangutans in an Indonesian rehabilitation center, Harry said.

“We are afraid [the orangutans] might not enter in a good condition and could affect other animals in the center,” he said.

Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, an orangutan expert from Jakarta’s National University, also said it would be difficult to find homes for the orangutans in Indonesia because all the rehabilitation centers were already full.

“We’ve had problems trying to release at least 48 orangutans back into their original habitat, so at this time many NGOs think the government should focus more on the animals in rehabilitation centers,” she said.

Indonesia has an estimated 7,500 Sumatran orangutans and 45,000 Bornean orangutans. Both populations are endangered.

(Source: The Jakarta Globe)

The International Workshop on Orangutan Conservation, which will run through July 15-16 at the beachside resort town of Sanur, is aimed at stabilizing the habitat and populations of both the Sumatran and Bornean subspecies by 2017, as well as completing a three-year-old rehabilitation program to release previously captive orangutans back into the wild by 2015.

Dr. Raffaella Commitante of the Orangutan Conservancy (OC) will make a case for effective partnerships at the conference with a paper entitled, “Methodology for Conservation: The Collaboration and Implementation to Succeed.” Dr. Commitante’s paper, which she wrote in collaboration with OC president Norm Rosen, makes clear that the highly individualized work currently underway cannot continue.

“Without a commitment for implementation, all the concepts, all the money, and all the people involved will not achieve the common goal, which in this instance is, to prevent orangutan extinction,” the paper states.

Meanwhile, the chief of the Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) foundation, Bungaran Saragih, said that very little progress had been made toward either stabilizing wild populations or releasing rehabilitated orangutans back into the wild.

“First, there are still no visible signs of stabilization of orangutan habitats or their populations,” he said. “Second, the rehabilitation target is still far out of reach, because in the three years since the plan was announced, we haven’t seen a single individual released back into the wild.”

Part of the problem, Bungaran said, was the difficulty in finding suitably large, undisturbed areas of forest in which to release the animals.

“At BOS, we have around 850 orangutans in rehabilitation [centers], but we can’t release them precisely because of this problem,” he said.

Bungaran did, however, say the international workshop was a step in the right direction and would allow all stakeholders to share their experiences on the current dire situation facing orangutan, as well as to evaluate actions taken thus far.

“Since 2007, there has been almost no coordination between the various stakeholders — the government, NGOs, the private sector,” he said. “I believe that this opportunity to evaluate the implementation of the action plan couldn’t have come at a better time. Hopefully we can reach some kind of understanding and get the full cooperation of all stakeholders.”

According to Bungaran, one of the main obstacles toward realizing the action plan was the apparent reluctance of the government and private sector to get involved in orangutan conservation efforts.
“Protecting orangutans should not be the sole domain of NGOs,” he said. “We need support from the government and from businesses, and that’s the message we’ll try to get through at the workshop.”

There are an estimated 7,500 Sumatran orangutans left in the wild, and some 45,000 of their Bornean cousins. The latter subspecies is categorized as endangered, while the former is critically endangered.

Orangutan expert Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, from Jakarta’s National University, said that more needed to be done to protect the animals.

“The current quandary is in law enforcement,” she said. “There are just as many cases these days of illegal orangutan trading — particularly in Kalimantan — as there has always been.”

In terms of releasing rehabilitated orangutans into the wild, Suci said businesses needed to play a bigger role in the conservation effort.

“Consider this: nearly 70 percent of orangutans live outside protected parks and reserves,” she said, “so it’s crucial that we get the private sector to contribute their land and efforts, otherwise forget about protecting the orangutan. There’s this impression that only conservationists, scientists and the government should deal with orangutan conservation, but we want all stakeholders, particularly businesses, to contribute to the effort. The national action plan will never work otherwise.”

Suci said that many logging and plantation companies across the country wanted to help but were hampered by poor coordination by the authorities, which she accused of not being serious about designating conservation areas for orangutans.

“That’s a shame, because the companies are really keen about helping out, and we’d really like to welcome them on board,” she added.

Harry Santoso, director of biodiversity at the Ministry of Forestry, conceded that the orangutan release program was “going rather slow,” but blamed it on the dearth of institutions willing to contribute to the effort.

“It’s going to be tough to meet the 2015 target because there aren’t that many institutions in the country that deal with orangutan conservation,” he said. “That’s why we’re hoping for a breakthrough at this workshop.”

Harry dismissed accusations that the government had been dragging its feet on the issue of orangutan conservation by arguing that its job was to supervise, facilitate and regulate, and not to get involved in the implementation of programs.

“That’s why we’re focusing on strengthening the existing regulations, facilitating stakeholders and increasing supervision for orangutan conservation,” he said. “Our hope is that other stakeholders, such as the private sector and NGOs, also play a part.”

(Source: The Jakarta Herald, OC staff)

British scientists who spent nine months observing the great apes in three European zoos identified 40 frequently used body language signals. These were employed repeatedly to send messages such as “I want to play”, “give it to me”, “go away”, “follow me”, or “stop doing that”.

“Play” gestures involved a range of clowning antics, including back rolls, placing objects on the head, and blowing raspberries.

“Nudge and shoo” movements meant an ape wanted to be left alone, while a hand to mouth “begging” gesture requested food.

Other gestures included hitting the ground, hair pulling, biting the air and grabbing.

This was the first study of great ape body language to focus on the intentional meanings of specific gestures. Two scientists from the University of St. Andrews observed 28 orangutans at Twycross Zoo in the UK, Apenheul Primate Park in the Netherlands, and the Durrell Trust in Jersey. Their study is reported in the journal Animal Cognition.

(Source: The Independent)

Dr. Commitante’s paper, which she wrote in collaboration with OC president Norm Rosen, makes clear that the highly individualized work currently underway cannot continue.

“Without a commitment for implementation, all the concepts, all the money, and all the people involved will not achieve the common goal, which in this instance is, to prevent orangutan extinction,” the paper states.

The “Man of the Forest” conference is hosted by the Directorate General of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation (PHKA), Ministry of Forestry, and the Indonesian Orangutan Forum (FORINA.

Commitante (pictured at left) and Rosen’s presentation will call for a fresh perspective on the extinction crisis currently facing not only orangutans, but virtually every species of animal life in Indonesia. They believe that unless conservation agencies, donors, and governments pool their resources, the disappearance of important mammals, birds, reptiles and fish – let alone their habitats – will continue.

Commitante and Rosen liken the battle to save Indonesia’s biodiversity to an all-out war.

“Working together toward our main goal of saving valuable species and habitat from extinction is clearly a huge part of achieving this goal,” they write. “.Egos and personal agendas must be set aside in favor of a collaborative approach toward success. As in war, heroes do emerge; but in the end, it is the collaborative spirit that is the true hero – people working together to sometimes achieve the impossible – that is how wars are won.”

Following the Bali conference, Commitante will proceed to Sumatra, where she will help facilitate the Orangutan Conservancy 2010 Veterinary Workshop, will be held August 2-7.

The Orangutan Conservancy was established in 1999 to support projects that focus on wild orangutan protection; reintroduction; education; and research. The Orangutan Conservancy is a partner of the Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP). For more information, please visit www.orangutan.com or contact click to email.

(Source: OC Staff)

Yogapermana will enroll in environmental engineering studies at Trisakti University in Jakarta.

Yogapermana, 25, spent the past three years working in orangutan conservation in Borneo, but became alarmed at the rapid destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests to make way for oil palm plantations.

“This destruction has got to stop and the only way to begin is to start from ones self,” said Yogapermana. “I believe that development can be achieved at the same time with nature preservations.”

The OC Scholarship was the brainchild of Dr. Raffaella Commitante, a member of the OC board of directors who has spent many years living and working in Southeast Asia. Commitante said she believes the OC Scholarship program is a natural compliment to OC’s other conservation projects.

“The Orangutan Conservancy is best-known for the rescue and rehabilitation of orphaned orangutans through our partners on the ground, and that work is obviously very important,” she said. “But it is just as important that we help educate local people, especially those who are committed to the long-term conservation of orangutans.”

The OC Scholarship program is limited to Indonesia and Malaysian students wishing to study within their own country.

The OC Scholarship program is the second major capacity development initiative launched by OC recently. In 2009, the inaugural OC Veterinary Workshop was held in Borneo, offering veterinary healthcare workers in Borneo and Sumatra the opportunity to get hands-on training in a variety of health and welfare areas.

The OC 2010 Veterinary Workshop will be held August 2-7 in Sumatra.

(Source: OC staff)

The Swiss confectionery-to-coffee giant said it was inviting a not-for-profit group to audit its supply chain and promised to cancel contracts with any firm found to be chopping down rainforests to produce the vegetable oil, which it uses in KitKat, Aero and Quality Street.

The concession followed a three-month campaign by the environmental group Greenpeace, which led to Nestlé being attacked on social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. One million people watched Greenpeace’s spoof advert for KitKat, despite its being taken off YouTube temporarily after a legal threat.

As well as illustrating the vulnerability of multinational companies to new media campaigns by NGOs which can galvanise individuals in a way that was impossible before the creation of the internet, the campaign also illustrated the intense environmental controversy surrounding palm oil.

Thousands of hectares of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to make way for oil palm plantations, depriving tribes of ancestral lands, increasing climate change emissions and killing rare animals such as the Sumatran tiger, sun bear, clouded leopard and pangolins. Campaigners have particularly stressed the damage done to orangutans, a close relative of man which lives only on the heavily deforested islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

Since The Independent disclosed the presence of palm oil in 43 of the UK’s top-selling grocery brands, companies such as Nestlé, Marks & Spencer, Cadbury and Mars have committed to moving to a sustainable supply.

But Nestlé had been a relatively slow mover, promising only to meet the latest acceptable date of 2015 set by the World Wildlife Fund for moving to supplies certified sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

On 17 March, Greenpeace began a campaign against Nestlé, launching an early morning protest at its UK headquarters in Croydon, Surrey, and posting its one-minute Have a Break? “advert” on the internet (pictured above). It showed an office worker biting into a KitKat containing an orangutan finger, which dripped blood onto a computer keyboard.

“Indonesian forests are being torn down to grow palm oil, which is the vegetable fat of choice for companies worldwide, including Nestlé,” Greenpeace complained. “But while many companies such as Unilever and Kraft are making efforts to disassociate themselves from the worst practices of the palm oil industry, Nestlé has done diddly squat.”

The action group claimed it had uncovered evidence that the Indonesian palm oil supplier Sinar Mas – which it said supplied Nestlé – had been involved in continuing deforestation. Nestlé denied it bought oil from Sinar Mas but said it would ask its supplier, Cargill, to investigate the claims. That was not enough to stop the campaign.

Members of the public posted angry messages on Nestlé’s Facebook page – substituting the word Killer for KitKat; anti-Nestlé campaign groups such as Baby Milk Action and Nestlé Critics took up the cause; and hundreds of thousands of people watched the grisly Have a Break? video.
On 15 April, Greenpeace disrupted Nestlé’s annual general meeting in Lausanne. Protesting “orangutans” met arriving shareholders and, inside the building, activists hidden in the ceiling unfurled banners with the message: “Nestlé, give the orangutans a break”.

Apparently braced for the protests, the company’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, defended the company’s position, saying Nestlé only used 320,000 tonnes of palm oil a year, slightly under one per cent of global production and less than the 500,000 tonnes used for bio-fuel in the UK and Germany. To applause, rather than blaming Nestlé for deforestation in Indonesia, he blamed a “political decision” to use palm oil as a bio-fuel. The protests continued.

On Monday, Nestlé announced what Greenpeace hailed as a “positive step” – the auditing of its supply chain by the Geneva-based Forest Trust. The company said: “By setting critical requirements for its procurement process and checking compliance with our supplier code, Nestlé wants to ensure that its products have no deforestation footprint.” The company intended to source 18 per cent of its palm oil from “sustainable sources” this year and 50 per cent by the end of 2011.

Scott Poyntor, the Forest Trusts’s executive director, said the commitment was a “game changer”. “For the first time, a global company is saying it doesn’t want its products to have a deforestation footprint, and is taking action to live up to its words,” he said.

Greenpeace welcomed the agreement, which it warned it would closely monitor. “Online and offline the message to Nestlé has been strong and relentless over the past two months,” it told its supporters.

“All of it – from protesting orangutans on the streets to Facebook status updates – has brought us to today’s commitment.”

(Source: The Independent)

The wiry 36-year-old still cuts down trees but now he’s doing it legally in a way that minimises damage to fragile forest ecosystems.

“I don’t have to play hide-and-seek with the forest police anymore. It’s safe doing my job now,” he told AFP in the jungles of East Kalimantan, or Indonesian Borneo.

He is also free of the powerful mafia bosses known as “cukong” who run Indonesia’s illicit timber industry.

“When I worked by myself I sometimes didn’t get paid by the cukong. I used to earn big money but they stole my timber many times,” he said.

Jaang is typical of the tribesmen who work for PT Belayan River Timber at its 97,500-hectare (241,000-acre) concession near Samarinda on southeastern Borneo.

With assistance from the US-based Nature Conservancy (TNC), the company is seeking to have its timber products certified by the internationally recognized Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as sustainably harvested.

But experts agree that certification alone is not going to stop Indonesia’s forests disappearing at a rate of about 300 football fields an hour, according to TNC estimates.

TNC sustainable forest management specialist Benjamin Jarvis said only 1.1 million hectares of Indonesian forest were being logged according to FSC standards, or less than two percent of the land under logging concessions.

Key to its strategy is the adoption of a cable system to pull felled trees from the forest, rather than using bulldozers that cut a four-metre (12-foot) path of destruction wherever they go.

FSC certification will enable Belayan River Timber to sell its products more easily in Europe and the United States, where import rules have recently been tightened to stem demand for cheap, illegal timber.

That’s an improvement on a few years ago, but nowhere near enough to make a difference, Center for International Forestry Research scientist Herry Purnomo said.

“Certification is one of the most effective instruments to help stop forest degradation and destruction, but it’s still far from enough to help save Indonesia’s forests,” he said.

A report by a coalition including the BlueGreen Alliance and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) released in the United States this month found that 40 to 55 percent of Indonesia’s timber is illegally harvested.

It warned that 98 percent of the archipelago’s lowland forests could be gone by 2022.

What’s at stake is not only the forests and their precious plants and animals, such as endangered Sumatran tigers and Javan rhinos.

According to RAN, carbon emissions from deforestation in Indonesia account for about five percent of global emissions, or more than all the cars, planes, buses and trains in the United States combined.

So the illegal trade is devastating species, undermining the legal timber industry and jeopardising UN-backed plans for a global market in carbon credits for avoided deforestation, known by its acronym REDD.

The market, which is likely to be a key part of any new international climate treaty, would see rich and polluting countries pay developing countries like Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their forests and the carbon they store.

But groups like Human Rights Watch, RAN and the BlueGreen Alliance say such plans are doomed to failure unless they address the problem of illegal logging.

“Otherwise, even the most well-intentioned plans would be undercut by demand-side forces and leakage of illegal timber products,” the BlueGreen Alliance report said.

Little progress has been made in the fight against the timber barons since leaders of the Group of Eight, the biggest consumer countries, pledged to “tackle illegal logging” at their summit at Gleneagles in 2005.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono recently vowed to take on the “logging mafia” but analysts doubt he will confront the powerful networks of officials, security personnel and big business who are involved.

For every logger like Jaang, there are many more who are still working for the cukong, cashing in on growing world demand for cheap timber products.

(Source: AFP)