Kalimantan: wildlife
Friends of Nature, People and Forests’ first project, when we started in 1997, was the rehabilitation and release of endangered orangutans in Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo.
The following year, Tanjung Puting National Park’s management asked us to run three orangutan rehabilitation posts at Tanjung Harapan, Pondok Tanggui and Camp Leaky. Over the next five years, we successfully rehabilitated and released 20 orangutans into the wild. All of them survived for a long time. The project wound up when new regulations, designed to reduce the spread of disease, restricted the release of orangutans that had been in contact with humans into areas with a wild population.
Since then, we’ve focused on rescuing wild orangutans from farms, palm oil plantations and villages. Our team relocate the orangutans to safe, protected areas, such as Tanjung Puting National Park and Lamandau Reserve.
One of the keys to the success of this work has been the relationships we’ve fostered with village communities who live near the parks. We’ve helped people understand the threats facing orangutans and their habitat. We’ve earned their support, and now they contact us when they find a wild orangutan; instead of killing it as they would other invading animals.
A few other highlights
- We’ve rehabilitated, released and/or rescued several sun bears. Read about Winki the sun bear.
- We ran a turtle conservation project, with the support of the local community, to protect nesting sites near Sungai Cabang Park. We relocated turtle eggs to a hatchery and later reintroduced some 2,000 hatchlings to the wild.
- Our team help any animals they encounter that have been kept illegally in captivity or have wandered onto a plantation or farm and need a secure place to live and breed. We protect them and, where possible, rehabilitate and release them.
Thank you to our donors, including the Humane Society International (Australia), for supporting this important work.