Visiting red haired relatives

18. November 2019, Monday
1° 23' 38" N, 110° 18' 28" E


Not far from Kuching is a reserve for our red-haired relatives.
No, I'm not talking about the Irish, but about the people of the forest. So that's the exact translation of the Malay word orangutan.

While hundreds of thousands of these beautiful apes lived in Borneo at the beginning of the 20th century, their numbers have shrunk to a few thousand today.
The greed for tropical timber, but above all for cheap palm oil, which is also propagated by green political reality objectors as renewable energy for fuel, year after year brutally destroys the habitat of these wonderful intelligent animals.
Semenggoh is a rehabilitation center near Kuching, taking care of the last orangutans near the city. Some of the animals kept in close quarters by rich business people as pets have found a new home here, others have been the victims of poaching.
All of them got used to life in the wild again through years of work by the Rangers.

The animals live wild in the jungle, but from time to time they come close to the gamekeeper station. There they sit in the trees and wait for the rangers to lay some fruit in the forest or to throw them up into the trees. So to speak, food to order.
They do not always come, sometimes the game wardens do not see individual animals for months, then they suddenly reappear.
We were fortunate enough to observe these wonderful people of the forest in freedom, who knows if future generations will have the opportunity to do so.