Cheek-padder

This is a wild, non-habituated, adult, male, orang utan. The only reason that he is allowing me to film him (he is very aware of my presence) is that he is preoccupied with his feeding. It is very likely that he is in danger of starving. As you can see at the beginning of this video, he is sitting in a relatively small tree in a forest that is more gap than canopy. There has been legal concession logging in this forest followed by waves of illegal logging that systematically take trees of lesser quality and size each cycle. This forest is plagued by a network of branching logging skids (tracks made to remove wood) that overlap to cover nearly all the forest adjacent to this small tributary to the Mentaya River (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq3sitjvH94&feature=channel ) . Clearly a forest missing this much of its trees can not support as much life as an undisturbed forest so even when wildlife is not persecuted directly by the loggers, they suffer from lack of food and cover. The remaining forest is then more susceptible to fire and wind as there is no longer a contiguous canopy to shelter neighboring tress and shade the forest floor.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• Orang utan
• Borneo
• Indonesia
• Kalimantan
• wildlife
• primate
• ape