mongabay:  17 January 2012


An Indonesian rock band, Navicula, is highlighting the plight of orangutans in their native country through a new song entitled, aptly, "Orangutan." The band has created a music video for the song, including footage of a documentary, Green: The Film that follows a starving female orangutan named Green. The band "dedicated the song to encourage people to do more in orangutan conservation, to protect this endangered species."

The orangutan is imperiled in Indonesia largely due to habitat loss for palm oil plantations and logging for pulp and paper plantations, but also hunting and killing the great apes as agricultural pests are additional problems. In fact, a recent study in PLoS One found that conflict between orangutans and humans proved worst in areas that have been converted for timber, wood-pulp, or palm oil. It concluded that orangutans are currently being killed at a rate faster than they can reproduce, suggesting orangutans could go extinct outside protected areas.

Along this line, recent news in Indonesia has focused on plantations allowing workers to kill orangutans. In one instance a Malaysian palm oil plantation company operating East Kalimantan was found to have been paying a bounty of $110 to workers for each orangutan they killed. Since the news broke, two major plantation companies, PT SMART and APP, have signed a zero-tolerance pledge for killing orangutans in their plantations.

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27 April 2012
Rescued orangutans returned to the rainforests of Indonesia are the first to be released in a decade Read Article »

17 April 2012
Orangutans may be smarter than previously thought if a new study into the sophisticated way they build nests is any indication. Read Article »

2 April 2012
Several multinational companies have vowed to boycott the huge forestry conglomerate, Asia Pulp and Paper, after a public outcry after evidence emerged of illegal logging by APP in Indonesia, that is damaging the habitat of rare animals such as the Sumatran tiger. Read Article »

28 February 2012

Four orangutans were released into the wild on Indonesia's Borneo island on Tuesday, an official said, as the country ramps up efforts to protect the animals from extinction. Read Article »

16 February 2012
The long-held contention that rural forest communities are the prime culprits in tropical forest destruction is increasingly being discredited, as evidence mounts that the best way to protect rainforests is to involve local residents in sustainable management.

7 February 2012
There have probably been at least 2,800 confiscations of illegally kept orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra since the early 1970s. Read Article »

27 January 2012
As bounty hunters with bush knives entrapped them in a circle and moved in for the kill, the only thing this mother orang-utan could think to do was to wrap a giant protective arm around her daughter. Read Article »

18 January 2012
When fruit is scarce, try chomping on a slow loris. That seems to be the strategy adopted by the normally vegetarian orang-utans, which have been spotted knocking the small primates out of trees and killing them with a bite to the head. Read Article »