Standing on the Verge of Blinking Out

In the humid afternoon sun at least 30 people trudged up the asphalt road, surrounded by rainforest on both sides, to get a glimpse of one our closest relatives: the orang-utan (Pongo pygmaeus). We didn't have to wait too long. Within minutes an adult female and youngster appeared on top of a roadside fence, and shortly after, crossed the pavement before ascending a utility cable. We scampered close, but stayed a bit back, as these red apes can be exceptionally surly. Alli and I raised our bionculars up and got a phenomenal look at an animal that is living on borrowed time. To twist the title of one of Funkadelic's rowdiest jams, and turn it into a pessimistic environmental critique: these mammals are standing on the verge of blinking out.

Top photo: Adult female Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) chilling on an electrical cable. Above: Stretching it out. The resemblance to people is incredible. *** All photos can be enlarged by clicking on them. ***

We had reservations about coming here. To the Semenggoh Nature Reserve that is. Located outside Kuching, in Malaysian Borneo, the area is amidst the city's burgeoning urban sprawl of malls and food joints, reminescemt of Arizona. We spent about three weeks in the greater Kuching area. As soon as the mama and young-in were seen the cameras came out and the clicking started at a fierce clip, myself included. I'd never seen orangutans in their native habitat before, but instead of getting goosebumps I just felt cheap and gross. Us tourists seemed as much a spectacle as these apes. I felt cheap, cause hello, admission to the park is cheap: $3.30 U.S. per person. Seeing them in dense rainforest "in the wild" costs prohibitively more. The gross feeling comes from the realization that coming here is probably doing these apes more harm than good.

Top photo: Coralling the tourists before the big show. Not much helpful or interesting info was provided. Above: Onward march.

The scenario goes like this: Borneo has been hacked down at an astronomical rate. The percentage of vanished rainforest is so high it takes a little while to digest the numbers. Three nations comprise Borneo: Indonesia (the massive state of Kalimantan), Brunei (tiny and gushing with oil dollars) and Malaysia accounting for two separate states: Sabah and Sarawak spread out from coast to coast in the north. Alli and I spent all our time in Sarawak. To do the cultural multiplicity and biodiversity of this island justice would take years. To keep things simple, and because I’m not any type of authority on Borneo deforestation, I’m mainly going to discuss Sarawak, based on our experiences, what I’ve read and researched, and the people I’ve had the pleasure to chat with.

Top photo: I love ridiculous green washing signs! Above: The first sight we had of the female carrying her kid on her back.

Seventy (70) percent of Sarawak’s rainforest has been destroyed in the last 20 years alone. Some sources say only three (3!) percent of the state’s primary rainforest is left. Three percent? It’s pathetic. I think one needs to read those numbers a few times to fully appreciate the wanton decimation. In my lifetime Sarawak’s ground went from rainforest to monoculture. Trees were chained sawed with delight, the earth got scorched to a crisp and in its wake vast seas of oil palm plantations sprouted up. To put it bluntly, Borneo will never be the same. Numerous people, and their indigenous way of life and land, were bladed and displaced. Politicians, wealthy insiders and government cronies got stupid rich, while already poor people got poorer. It sounds so cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less sad. Aside from the human attrition of the last decades, the orangutan, with countless other rainforest species, has suffered the same fate.

Top photo: Looking out our plane's window at an endless oil palm plantation. Sarawak (and most of Borneo) used to be covered in forest, but now oil palm monoculture is king. This plantation was seen on our way to Gunung Mulu National Park in NW Sarawak, it's not near Semenggoh. Above: About to go up.

The reason we felt cheap and gross is a little more complicated. With this reserve being so close to Kuching, it’s a hefty draw to any tourist who visits eastern Sarawak. Orangutan posters, images and tour ads are dispersed throughout the city. At the entrance station to Kubah National Park the only poster plastered on the wall was of two orangutans about to kiss. It was from Malaysia’s Ministry of Tourism, with their boastful tagline “Malaysia – Truly Asia,” the only text. How cute. 

 

The youngster putting on a show with its plastic bottle while all of us snap away below.

Now to see these creatures in their native habitat, “in-the-wild,” so to speak, it ain’t cheap. It costs a lot and there’s no guarantee you’ll even see them. I believe it’s easier to see them in Sabah and Kalimantan, but don’t quote me, I’m just an out-of-work lowly blogger. Alli and I decided it was too expensive to go spend a week or so trying to get a peek at our red relatives. It’s not because we’re cheap, but once you start traveling, you realize you can’t do everything.

What sucks is that the guided trips to see these wild orangs are the people you should support with your tourist dollars. Local guides and communities who are helping preserve the habitat and fight for conservation in a state that badly needs it (with only 3% left you don’t have much to lose). But alas, this one we would sit out. I told Alli I’d settle for Semenggoh. She told me why we shouldn’t go. I processed it and had my qualms, but I wanted to see it anyway to experience the hackneyed display. Very quickly I learned she was spot on. The reasons follow.

When rainforest is getting ravaged orangutans are found. These creatures don’t like to go to ground as they spend almost all their time up top in the trees. The found orangs are gathered up and then sent off to a reserve such as Semenggoh. Maybe some also get recovered from the black-market wildlife trade. Semenggoh is only 653 hectares. Anyone remember how many acres or square miles to a hectare? Me neither. Thanks again Internet. This reserve constitutes 1,614 acres or 2.52 square miles. Small change. For all my desert folks out there, in comparison the Tucson Mountain District of Saguaro National Park (you know, the park whose main entrance is just past the Desert Museum) is about 24,000 acres or 37.5 square miles. By no means is TMD considered a ‘sizeable’ national park. Semenggoh is not even twice as big as Tumamoc Hill in Tucson.

Get why is feels like a zoo?

So this parcel of orangutan land is tiny. But it’s bubbling over with animals. And that’s what tourists want to see. The argument is quite simple. The logging industry and political muscle have an impeccable card to play: why preserve all this natural habitat (the rainforest that is disappearing) when you can have a bunch of orangutans in a minuscule reserve that tourists flock to. Why conserve a patch of land the size of Grand Canyon National Park when teeny Chiricahua National Monument will do? Its win-win-win, according to Michael Scott’s conflict resolution binder.

Orangutans can continue to live; tourists are placated and satisfied; and logging and monoculture keep moving on unabated. By showing up with our Ringgit to pay and my camera ready to go gonzo for orang, we are partly complicit in the miserable slide of Borneo’s rainforest and orangutans into the annals of history. Whoa, that was a loaded, dramatic sentence. What I’m trying to get at here is that these orangutans are one baby step above a zoo population. They’re not playing their ecological roles in the forest, they’re playing their entertainment roles, just like in the kissing poster I observed at Kubah.

I love this photo. These apes are beyond agile.

The other aspect in this equation is that the rainforest harbors a whole lotta more species of plants and animals. Orangutans just happen to be the most charismatic, with faces, hands and limbs like us. That’s also why Alli and I visited Borneo. The name alone conjures up naturalist adventure and gets the brain buzzing with the awesome number of things one can see here in the rainforests: hornbills, cobras and reed snakes, tarsiers, sun bears, leafbirds, stick insects, flying frogs, minivets and tons more. Where do they all go? A few of the more charming species might get placed into a sanctuary, but the others disappear, die, maybe a few migrate on and find some habitat elsewhere. Some species can make do in the plantation.

Concrete jungle.

The future indeed looks grim for Borneo, its rainforest, indigenous people, orangutans and all the other countless species. But pessimism is a dead end street. Wide-eyed optimism with the determination to fight must continue. Without trying everything would be screwed anyway. So my moldy field hat goes off to everyone trying to protect what Borneo has left. I’m glad I saw the female orangutan and her kid at Semenggoh. It makes you realize how little time this species and its habitat have if the chain saws don’t cease. By the end of this decade most of the indigenous people’s ancestral land could be gone, along with any other tracts of remaining rainforest. Poof! Semenggoh could easily become an outdoor zoo, no more need to label it a reserve. Tourists would still show up and Sarawak Forestry could charge a lot more than $3.00 USD a head.

More photos of the whole experience can be found below:

Jeeeeez, look at those back muscles!

People have short attention spans. Pretty soon, the crowd fizzled out.

Sea Turtle Talk Time, Internet Style

Afternoon people (except most people reading this are sleeping right now). Here at the Juara Turtle Project (JTP) we give a whole lotta turtle talks. On some days when the tourists are poppin' in on a constant basis we give more than a lot, as we can be consumed by turtle talkin' for easily over an hour or two. That's no problem though because most of the time the talks are fun and informative, but in a sense the info can be very depressing with a dash of optimism thrown in, too.

Two German tourists getting to know Jo the Green Sea Turtle on one of our turtle talks.

Why depressing? Well, let me give a sea turtle talk to y'all, it's going to be in broad strokes so if you know a lot about these creatures already, sorry in advance for the repetition (you guys can just look at the photos). This is the JTP turtle talk, Internet edition! So there's no way to sugar coat the facts. Sea turtles are in SERIOUS trouble. To put it simply: there just ain't a lot left of 'em in the world's oceans. Only seven species exist and all have the unfortunate status of "endangered" or "critically endangered." Hundreds of millions of Green Turtles (Chelonia mydas) used to swim in the Earth's tropical and subtropical oceans. In 2004, after a worldwide accumulation of data, only about 89,000 female turtles were coming ashore to nest. Male sea turtles never come ashore, only the females, so getting a line on total population #s is rather tricky.

A Green Sea Turtle laying eggs on Mentawak Beach on 14 April 2012.

I don't want to ramble on forever about turtles (trust me, I can ramble, anyone who has ever received a voice mail from me can attest to it) so I'll try to keep this post neat and to-the-point. On Tioman Island here we used to get 4 species of sea turtle: the aforementioned Green, the giant Leatherback (the largest sea turtle, they can weigh up to 500 kg, sorry America, we're metric system now!), Hawksbills and Olive Ridleys. As Tom Petty sings, the Leatherback and Olives "don't come a-round here anymore." Luckily, the Green and Hawksbill still do. A reason for the drastic decline in sea turtle numbers on Tioman is that people collected the eggs to eat. People who lived here ate them, as did tourists who came to the island. And they were collecting the whole caboodle so no new babies were reaching the ocean. You can see where this is going: no new babies = very few remaining turtles returning to Tioman. Female turtles return to nest at the site they were born at. Talk about impressive: Tioman turtles will swim to the Philippines and Australia to feed, then turn around and haul shell back here to drop off their next generation.

Charles Fisher sadly looking at a poached nest on Mentawak Beach. Unfortunately JTP didn't find it in time. It's a photo of a photo.

So at JTP we patrol the beach we live behind on a nightly basis, multiple times per night depending on when high tide is. We look for turtles, or turtle tracks, and if there is a nesting female we collect her eggs and then place them in our hatchery on the beach. We're also patrolling two beaches south of Juara Bay by boat in the morning. After 2 months the babies all come up at the same time and then we release them exactly where we found them. Those cute little flipper happy turtles want to get to the ocean as fast as they can once they're born. If 1 out the 129 Hawksbill eggs Alli placed in our hatchery this morning survive then that's a success. The females drop a lot of eggs, but not many of them make it.

Alli placing 129 Hawksbill eggs into our hatchery. We found this nest earlier this morning on a nearby beach.

The other threats are everywhere, mostly human-caused. Drowning in fishing nets is a large one (shrimping, long-lining, etc.). Being reptiles these creatures need to breathe so they can only hold there breath for so long (an hour is pushing it to the brink for most species). People still eat their meat (turtle steak used to be a common cuisine) and eggs, and turn their shells into tourist trinkets. Boats hit them, too. Light pollution scares nesting females away, and the ever-encroaching beast known as "development" swallows up nesting habitat every year. Trash in our waters gets mistaken as food: plastics bags look like jellyfish, cigarette butts are the shape of a floating snack.

What Green Sea turtle tracks look like. We look for these on our nightly walks. These tracks are from the above female in the photo laying eggs.

Bam! Have I got you depressed yet? Sorry, the numbers are sobering and like I said, trying to sugar coat deep fried gruel is tough. But here at JTP we're trying to help out as much as we can. We patrol the beaches, collect the eggs and get as many babies in the ocean as possible. We are working on sea turtle friendly lighting for the nesting beach in front of us. Protecting nesting habitat is also on the docket. Education and outreach is always important. We are open to the public, and like I said before, we give a lot of turtle talks on a daily basis. And working with the fisheries department and the marine park around Tioman is a priority as well. A postive side to all this: communities and organizations that have continually collected eggs and released them for 30+ years (coincidentally how long a lot of species take to reach sexual maturity) have seen nesting increases. That's more turtles on the beach mon. It takes time to turn things around, but it can be done.

That's a lot of dead turtle on the line. Unfortunately this happens all too often. Another photo of a photo.

So what can individuals do? I'll touch upon this in another post as I believe I have broken my own goal, and have rambled on for a quite a bit. But remember: it isn't just about sea turtles. A striking number of species face extinction in the ocean, from huge sharks to smaller ugly fish (the Monkfish anyone?) The hope is since sea turtles are sexy charismatic megafauana (for instance: not many people hate on sea turtles, but folks sure do hate rattlesnakes) people will not only get involved to help their seven species, but the smorgasbord of other marine life that faces a continued battle to not blink out before my generation passes. Thanks for reading and if you have anyone questions about all this (and I know it's a lot) please do ask me or Alli.

Enlarge this photo to read. It's a great summary of the problems sea turtles, and a lot of marine life, face.