Rare Orangutans Found In Kalimantan

An orangutan from a newly found population is seen in Sangkulirang forest in Kalimantan (Photo: The Nature Conservancy, AP)

Sangkulirang, East Kalimantan- A team of conservationists has found a cluster of orangutans in a remote area in Sangkulirang subdistrict in East Kalimantan Province.

The Nature Conservancy`s senior ecologist, Erik Meijaard, told the Jakarta Globe on Sunday that the orangutan population inhabited a 2,500-square-kilometer area out of the 8,000-square-kilometer limestone cliffs that nestled between the Berau and East Kutai districts.

Nardiyono, who led the team that surveyed the area for 10 days in December 2008, said they came across three orangutans during the survey, which was quite surprising as this kind of encounter is rare since orangutans were solitary primates.

“We could not specify their exact number but we could conclude from our survey that the orangutan population in that area is quite significant,” Nardiyono said, adding that they came up with 219 orangutan nests based on the 8.6-kilometer transect line that they used to estimate the population.

“This is comparatively higher from other places where we have used the same method,” Nardiyono said. In 2004 he said they only came up with 18 nests out of the four-kilometer transect line they used in Berau district.

`This makes them vulnerable to extinction because of land conversion for mining, palm oil plantation or local farming`

Nardiyono, TNC

He said that to determine the actual orangutan population in the area, they have to study the nest decay rate first.

There are an estimated 70,000 orangutans in Sumatra and Kalimantan islands, he said, and 75 percent of them live in areas undesignated as protected forest or conservation area.

“This makes them vulnerable to an alarming rate of extinction because of land conversion for mining, palm oil plantation or local farming,” Nardiyono said.

A biologist and primate conservation expert from the National University in Jakarta, Suci Utami, said that the team`s finding was “a delight.”

Suci said the discovered cluster represented the Pongo pygmaeus morio, a Kalimantan orangutan subspecies, whose population was scattered between East Kalimantan and Sabah in Malaysia.

“This is good news that we have an additional population of the rare subspecies,” Suci said, adding that the last recorded population of the subspecies in 2004 was about 4,800.

Nardiyono said that apart from discovering the orangutan cluster, the team also came across other protected animals, such as the sun bears, large-nosed proboscis monkeys, or bekantan in Indonesian, leaf monkeys and the Ciconia stormi bird, also know as the Storm`s stork bird, whose worldwide population was estimated at less than a thousand, with up to 300 out of them found in Indonesia.

The world`s authority on the conservation status of species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, lists these animal species as vulnerable. Ismira Lutfia

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