The banana skins were an ominous sign. As was the branch that had been broken off to get to the fruit. Had Edi Ramli walked into the forest, he might have seen scattered balls of bark that had been ripped off trees, chewed like gum, then spat out. It takes a powerful jaw to do that. Closer to Edi\u2019s home, there was an intricate construction of bent and broken branches high in a tree. The nest.<\/p>\n
It was October, the fruiting season. The pile of half-eaten bananas was less than a minute\u2019s walk from where Edi and his family slept. He felt nervous. He got on with his day. He picked sweetcorn and sold it at the market. He bought a carton of chocolate milk and biscuits for his grandson. He and his wife, Siti Munawaroh, ran the farm with their three adult children. They prepped the land, sowed seeds, tended crops. Survival depended on what they could grow.<\/p>\n
Now, at five in the afternoon, the light was beginning to fade. Suddenly, Edi heard a cry. A neighbour\u2019s child who\u2019d been bathing in the river came running back, frightened. He said he\u2019d seen an orangutan. Edi ran towards the river, the farm\u2019s guard dog at his heels. In a clearing barely 100 metres away, he saw the reddish bulk of the orangutan. It was an adult male; he could tell from the large cheek pads. The creature was huge, about 90kg, and a good deal stronger than he was. One swipe and he\u2019d be knocked to the ground. The dog ran after the orangutan, barking ferociously. The orangutan disappeared into the undergrowth.<\/p>\n
Edi, 55, and Siti, 51, live on a small farm on the southern, Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, called Kalimantan, in a remote spot on the west coast. They are originally from Java, the island that is home to more than 157 million people. A decade ago, Edi was working as a builder and Siti as a machinist in a garment factory. But they found Java stultifying, and disliked the crowds, the noise and the pollution. Then they discovered the government would pay to move them elsewhere.<\/p>\n
In 2016, Edi and his family joined a scheme set up to relocate people from Indonesia\u2019s overcrowded inner islands to the less populated outer islands. The scheme, known as transmigration, was a form of experimental population engineering on a grand scale. It was started in the 19th century by Dutch colonialists, and reached its peak in the 1980s: 2.5 million people were resettled between 1979 and 1984. Each family is given land, a house and a small amount of money (about 4m rupiah: \u00a3170).<\/p>\n
A map of Borneo including West Kalimantan<\/a><\/p>\n Edi and his family loved their new home, a haven of light and space after the city. But unbeknown to him, he\u2019d been encouraged to settle near one of the largest populations of wild orangutans in West Kalimantan. About 2,500 live in Gunung Palung, the national park almost on his doorstep. His farm is close to the park\u2019s buffer zone, a strip of land supposed to cushion the protected forest from human development. But it\u2019s not demarcated. There are no deep ditches or high walls. And, of course, orangutans don\u2019t know boundaries. Besides, the land Edi was now cultivating had once been their territory. Orangutans can live for up to 45 years and have strong territorial instincts. They carry on visiting the areas they\u2019ve always ranged in, even when those areas have been violently changed.<\/p>\n Since the 1970s, hundreds of hectares of forest in Borneo have been cleared to grow rice and pineapples and, more recently, oil palms. The large spiky palms with their red, bulbous, oil-rich fruit have become the main cash crop in this once densely forested area.<\/p>\n Since the transmigration scheme opened up this area to new settlers in 2016, the orangutans\u2019 forest habitat has been disappearing, and the settlers have found their crops and gardens invaded by unwelcome visitors.<\/p>\n Most of us see orangutans as adorable, with their tufts of red hair and solemn eyes. They are known as devoted mothers. Their hands are very like ours. The renowned primatologist Birut\u00e9 Galdikas once remarked: \u201cOrangutans have souls, absolutely.\u201d But they are also big, smart and strong, and locals can find them scary, says Karmele Llano S\u00e1nchez from Yiari, a charity based in West Kalimantan that works across Indonesia to protect orangutans and their habitat. The charity had been receiving a stream of messages about orangutans taking bites out of precious fruit, and scaring children. There was no reason for alarm, Yiari told callers. Orangutans are generally peaceful, and only become dangerous if threatened or cornered. Orangutans had not directly attacked humans, according to Yiari (though there had been occasions where orangutans had charged at people); but humans had attacked orangutans.<\/p>\n As the population of southern and western Kalimantan has increased, and farms and new settlements have expanded, conservationists have been sending out rescue parties to catch orangutans that have come into conflict with humans. The apes are tranquillised and moved to a more remote area, where they are released back into the wild. This approach has become common, but according to a recent study<\/a>, which triggered fierce debate, moving orangutans does more harm than good. In their new environment, they may struggle to find food, and get attacked by orangutans who view them as intruders. Many are moved more than 30 miles away, but some captured animals make their way back to their original home, the authors claim, even when their home territory has been violently altered. The solution, said Julie Sherman, the director of conservation non-profit Wildlife Impact and a lead author of the paper, is not to remove animals to alien territory, but for humans and orangutans to live alongside each other.<\/p>\n Yiari has rescued 270 orangutans at risk in the past 12 years, and defends the practice. \u201cA large number are babies from mothers that have been killed,\u201d said Llano S\u00e1nchez. \u201cI\u2019m not saying that 100% of the orangutans we\u2019ve rescued and released have survived, but if we hadn\u2019t rescued them, they would be 100% dead, for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019ve got farmers shooting at orangutans, or the forest on fire, what should we do?\u201d asked Gail Campbell-Smith, a primatologist who works at Yiari. \u201cShould we leave the animal to die? What should we do in that moment in time? Moving them is the last resort when we\u2019ve done everything else that we can.\u201d<\/p>\n When Llano S\u00e1nchez first visited Kalimantan as a vet in 2005, the drive to convert land into oil palm plantations was well under way. She encountered the roaring of chainsaws and vehicles, crashing trees and people yelling. The bulk of palm oil expansion was between 2001 and 2012, when powerful corporations descended, and things really started to speed up. At the peak in West Kalimantan in 2012, an area of ancient forest slighty less than the size of Greater London was cleared in one year<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was crazy,\u201d she said. \u201cSo many orangutans were being displaced and wiped out.\u201d A lean and slight woman in her late 40s, Llano S\u00e1nchez speaks forcefully, as if she\u2019s running out of time to get her message across. She showed me a video shot in the district of Ketapang, West Kalimantan, in 2013. Orangutans were clambering around among felled branches, charred tree stumps and upended root balls in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.<\/p>\n The place where the video was shot is now mile after mile of evenly spaced trees, each topped with a dense crown of fronds. Palms are planted nine metres apart and the fruit is harvested by hand, with a machete, chisel or long-handled sickle, which is used to prise the fruit bunches from the body of the tree. The oil extracted from the flesh and kernel is highly versatile, turning up in about half of all supermarket products globally, from pizza dough to lipsticks.<\/p>\n Deforestation and an oil palm plantation in Kalimantan, Borneo. Photograph: Erberto Zani\/Alamy<\/p>\n Indonesia is now the biggest palm oil producer in the world, responsible for 59% of global output, worth about \u00a326bn a year.<\/p>\n Besides the major commercial plantations, villagers in very out-of-the-way places are clearing pieces of land to create their own palm oil smallholdings. Oil palms have changed fortunes. Villagers have been able to fix up their houses, buy a motorbike, set up a hair salon.<\/p>\n It is in many ways a remarkable crop. On a per-hectare basis it produces between six and 10 times more oil than equivalents such as soya bean. But palm oil has been calamitous to wildlife, and not just to orangutans. The plantations are hostile environments for monkeys and birds \u2013 they are quiet, oddly dead places \u2013 but for snakes and rats they are a paradise. Rats eat the palm oil kernels and the snakes feast off the rats.<\/p>\n Despite pressure from environmental campaigners, it is not easy to prevent illegal deforestation. The palm oil industry is enormous, supply chains are complex and include independent farmers who have as little as two-hectare plots. These smallholders mostly sell their fruit to companies for processing. The number of smallholders clearing ground to plant palms is growing fast, and they are largely unmonitored. Smallholders are not just converting tiny patches of existing cropland, according to a study<\/a> of their environmental impact. People are avoiding the regulations that restrict companies and finding pristine forests to slash open.<\/p>\n On a hot, soupy morning on 26 October, I travelled with the photographer Fergus Thomas to remote West Kalimantan, 850 miles from the skyscrapers and grid-locked streets of Jakarta, about 1,000 miles from the beach resorts of Bali. The port town of Ketapang, one of the largest in the region, has no public transport and only three traffic lights for a population of 93,000 people who mainly get around on motorbikes.<\/p>\n Edi lives in a village two hours north of Ketapang. To reach his farm from the road, we rode a motorbike for 10 minutes down a dirt track, through pools of muddy water and over an unsteady wooden bridge. A lean man with smiling eyes, hardy and resourceful, Edi was dressed in wellington boots, battered shorts and T-shirt with the face of Joko Widodo, the former president of Indonesia, who stepped down in 2024; the T-shirt was a freebie from the transmigration scheme.<\/p>\n About 150 families were moved here from Java. More than 100 of these families have since moved back. \u201cIt\u2019s a very different life to the big city,\u201d said Edi. \u201cYou have everything in Java but nothing here.\u201d It was the rainy season and the ground was a quagmire. I slithered around in the mud. Water still gushed from the corrugated tin roof of the family shelter. But Edi remained cheerful. \u201cWe knew the conditions before we moved here,\u201d he said. \u201cWe adapt to the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n Edi and his family live in a makeshift wooden shelter with a raised wooden platform like a raft. It is basic, but the family prefer it to the house in the nearby \u201ctransmigration village\u201d. They have all they need: sleeping bags; solar panels to charge their mobile phones and the water pump; a one-gallon plastic water container and a gas camping stove. Their home is surrounded by orderly, cultivated fields, with a boundary of banana palms.<\/p>\n There are restrictions on the people who arrive from the city. Recipients are not allowed to sell the land, but plenty do. \u201cThey get the land for free, sell it and then walk away,\u201d said Llano S\u00e1nchez. We used a drone to get a bird\u2019s eye view of the area. It\u2019s a hodgepodge of forest fragments and small domestic plots with rambutans and jackfruit \u2013 crops for the family to eat and to sell in the market. The brown of the transmigration village can be seen close to the verdant forest. There is a sand mine that supplies high quality silica for glass, construction and other industrial applications. And then, in a mixed mosaic with other crops, the distinctive green fronds of oil palms sprouting upwards, like a pattern on a carpet.<\/p>\n Edi on his way to sell his crops at market. Photograph: Fergus Thomas<\/p>\n Oil palms lined both sides of every road we drove down. They sprouted on riverbanks and scrub land. You might think it was a weed haphazardly self-planting, but it\u2019s been planted with care. Edi had 200 or so seedlings still in pots lined up in a row next to the deep furrows of his tomato plants. He\u2019d grown them from seed at a cost of 20,000 rupiahs. When they are three years old, the palms will start to bear fruit. Edi will expect two harvests a month (driven by 2kg of fertiliser every three months). Families can earn about \u00a3100 a hectare (about 140 to 160 plants) with each harvest.<\/p>\n The next day, I had coffee with a group of women in a nearby village who patrol the forest checking for wildfires, which are a big problem in this area. It is much cheaper for farmers and developers to clear land by burning down trees than to hire a digger. Set up by Yiari four years ago, the Power of Mama is a surveillance team of 118 women from eight local villages who take turns to patrol the forest on motorbikes; some are being trained as firefighters.<\/p>\n Protected forests are supposed to keep the area as wild and shielded from human activity as possible. But this hasn\u2019t been the case. The strip of trees in the buffer zone surrounding the perimeter of Gunung Palung has been whittled down over the past few decades from a width of 10km to 2km. In 2003, illegal loggers began cutting down trees within the actual research site where orangutans are monitored.<\/p>\n Orangutans forced out of their home territory quickly get into trouble. Early one morning last summer, a baby orangutan was spotted clinging to the tall slender trunk of a jabon tree, half a mile or so from Edi\u2019s farm. An hour later, the mother was found, hidden in tall grasses nearby. She had a wound 5cm deep on her back. The weapon, likely a spear of some sort, had penetrated her kidney. It took a week for her to die. The baby was taken to a centre for rehabilitation and eventually released into the forest, alone.<\/p>\n As climate breakdown and human populations have brought chaos to the natural world, translocation has become a core conservation tool. It can be used to restore almost-extinct wildlife (kakapo in New Zealand); return a species to where it used to be (beavers in Great Britain); or move it to somewhere it\u2019s never been before (western swamp tortoises in Australia).<\/p>\n In conservation circles, translocation is controversial, particularly if the reason the wildlife is being moved is because it\u2019s come to be seen as a \u201cproblem\u201d to people: that is, it has wrecked harvests, eaten livestock or scared children. \u201cIt\u2019s a very human response to move things out of our way that we don\u2019t want there, but it\u2019s about our interests and desires, as opposed to the orangutans\u2019,\u201d says Julie Sherman, who is based in Portland, Oregon. \u201cGlobally, [translocation] is not generally an effective way to resolve conflicts with wild terrestrial animals.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2015, Sherman and her colleague Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores, became interested in the fact that translocation was being promoted to protect orangutans in Indonesia. In the course of their research, they found that between 2005 and 2022, at least 988 orangutans were captured for translocation in Indonesia. The mechanics of translocation, which usually means uprooting an orangutan from familiar territory and framing it as a \u201crescue\u201d, is what most worries Sherman and Wich. NGOs increasingly rely on Instagram and TikTok to fundraise and engage with the public, and the drama of a \u201crescue\u201d is great for engagement. \u201cWhat is really disturbing is seeing videos of animals fleeing towards a forest and people continue to pursue it for whatever reason,\u201d said Sherman. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard on the animal.\u201d<\/p>\n A palm-oil processing plant in West Kalimantan. Photograph: Yiari<\/p>\n As a species, orangutans seem particularly ill-suited to being moved. Wild orangutans have a mental map of the forest built up over many years. They know which trees are fruiting and when. Translocation is an alarming intervention in their social fabric. Sherman speaks about orangutans in somewhat human terms: an older male orangutan is a \u201cgrandfather\u201d; they have \u201cfriends\u201d, \u201cneighbours\u201d. \u201cYou are pulling that animal away from its family and friends and putting it in a group of strangers,\u201d she said. When relocated, they\u2019re at risk of being attacked by hostile animals on whose territory they arrive with no warning, said Wich, who was also on the call. \u201cThese are highly intelligent animals, so it must be very traumatic for them.\u201d<\/p>\n No one really knows what happens to wild orangutans after they\u2019ve been moved. Tracking devices to know how they get on are expensive and invasive. Fitting a global positioning system tracker, say, requires surgery, plus a two-week recovery period. \u201cThere just isn\u2019t the human capacity to follow all these animals, the funding or the time,\u201d said Sherman. She asked: should we be moving animals we aren\u2019t equipped to monitor?<\/p>\n Wich and Sherman believe that, rather than moving them to unfamiliar areas, more effort is required to achieve peaceful coexistence. \u201cIt\u2019s really key that we work with local communities and companies to find a solution,\u201d said Wich. Sherman mentioned financial compensation and insurance as possible solutions. Wich and Sherman developed a programme of pilot workshops where villagers talk with local NGOs and decide how they might live alongside orangutans without killing or removing them.<\/p>\n On a hot day in 2009, Llano S\u00e1nchez stopped at a house in Pontianak, the largest city in West Kalimantan. A large male orangutan was chained to a low, wooden platform in the back yard, exposed to the sun and rain and the raw sewage and wastewater that ran underneath him. Jojo, as he was called, had been kept as a pet for 10 years. \u201cIt was so painful to see,\u201d Llano S\u00e1nchez said.<\/p>\n Llano Sanchez grew up in Spain where she trained as a vet. In 2003, aged 25, she came to Indonesia to volunteer in a rescue centre in Java. In 2005, she met her husband, Argitoe Ranting, who was not just an expert in orangutans, but also had a profound knowledge of the forest. He is from the Dayak tribe, the original forest dwellers of Kalimantan. A year later, they set up a rescue centre for macaques and slow lorises in Java. She was working in Central Kalimantan when she was asked to check on Jojo. At that time, keeping a pet orangutan was a status symbol, even though it was (and is) illegal.<\/p>\n Jojo was malnourished, with rickets and pneumonia. \u201cThe chain had gone into his flesh and it had got quite infected,\u201d she said. She cleaned the wound and put the chain back on Jojo\u2019s other ankle. \u201cI had to leave him there as there was nowhere else to take him.\u201d The following year, Llano S\u00e1nchez and her husband launched a second rescue centre, this time for orangutans in West Kalimantan. \u201cThe first orangutan we rescued was Jojo.\u201d<\/p>\n An orangutan that had been found near Iskandar\u2019s house being released in a new location. Photograph: Yiari<\/p>\n Today, the centre occupies a peaceful enclave of about 200 hectares (500 acres), a 30-minute drive north of Ketapang. It includes a veterinary clinic, rehabilitation centre and forest school to teach survival skills to orphaned orangutans. Llano S\u00e1nchez\u2019s charity, Yiari, employs nearly 300 people across three sites: Java, West Kalimantan and Sumatra, as well as casual staff, patrol teams and experts in the field. Its partner, International Animal Rescue, is based in the UK. Yiari currently has 60 orangutans in this sanctuary, including Jojo.<\/p>\n Yiari has translocated 72 wild orangutans since 2009. Each ape is given a name and entered on a database, and fitted with a microchip, implanted between its shoulder blades. From this data Yiari discovered that, in fact, only 3% of those 72 orangutans had previously been moved. But there may be more, cautions Gail Campbell-Smith. They only come across the ones that have become a problem.<\/p>\n Campbell-Smith has been working at Yiari for 15 years. She was the first to study orangutans in a \u201chuman-dominated landscape\u201d in Sumatra, and made detailed observations of how orangutan behaviour changed around humans. Rather than rising and retiring with the sun, for instance, the orangutans would lie in their nests until late afternoon, \u201cwaiting for humans to leave\u201d. Their diet had adapted to include oil palm shoots. \u201cAn odd one, as that is not a tree that orangutans usually like,\u201d she said. They also spent more time on the ground. Orangutans are normally arboreal. They don\u2019t swing by their arms from tree to tree at speed like monkeys, but \u201ctree-sway\u201d. They use branches like a pole vaulter, letting their weight bow the branch to propel them in tremendous arcs through the air. \u201cThey move from tree A to tree B using their bodies to swing,\u201d Campbell-Smith explained. But they couldn\u2019t go to tree B, because it had been cut down. So, they had to go to tree C and to get to tree C they were forced on to the ground.\u201d They are slow and lumbering on all fours, and when they\u2019re out of their protected areas, they are vulnerable to humans who want to kill them.<\/p>\n Llano S\u00e1nchez doesn\u2019t disagree with Wich and Sherman that capturing and moving orangutans is invasive and frightening for the animals, but in the moment, they see no alternative. \u201cWe are dealing with emergencies,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are on the frontline.\u201d<\/p>\n Palm oil has made a lot of local people far richer than they ever imagined. As a boy growing up in the village of Simpang Tiga in Ketapang province, Iskandar would run from his home to the nearby forest and fill his pockets with wild rambutans and mangoes. \u201cJust like the monkeys!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Five decades on, the place where he grew up is a boom town. It consists of a roadside strip lined with a Catholic church and many small businesses: coffee stalls, restaurants offering grilled fish, chunks of giant jackfruit in a coconut sauce, fried tempeh, mounds of rice. The town is now surrounded by 100 sq miles of oil palm plantations owned by two companies: Bumitama Agri Ltd (BGA) and Sinar Mas, one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia.<\/p>\n Iskandar\u2019s home is set back from the main road. We sat drinking coffee on his tiled patio next to a tank of ornamental catfish as trucks barrelled past. Iskandar, 55, is glossy-looking with good teeth. The house where he lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter has three bedrooms, and ornate furniture. He owns a Toyota Rush, two dump trucks and a pickup. \u201cI grew up poor and wanted something better for myself,\u201d he said. He has his own oil palm plantation, which makes him about \u00a39,600 a year (about five-and-a-half times the average salary). He\u2019s also done a deal with BGA, where he acts as middleman and quality controller for smallholders selling their crop to the company.<\/p>\n Every day about 20 to 30 dump trucks from across the region pull up outside his house, loaded with spiky oil palm heads. Iskandar checks the paperwork to ensure the oil palm heads are not stolen (palm oil theft is a growing problem) and after the consignment has been dropped off at BGA, he pays the drivers.<\/p>\n For Iskandar, orangutans are a familiar problem. Last May, a male orangutan appeared in his neighbour\u2019s garden. This particular animal had been spotted on several occasions crossing the main road, slow and awkward on all fours, near the coffee shop and the church. After complaints, he was captured and moved to Gunung Tarak protected forest, a four-hour drive away. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t stay here,\u201d says Iskandar, \u201cHis life was in danger.\u201d<\/p>\n Other smallholders in the area had been troubled by orangutans, and demanded they be removed, or else they would kill them. Naha, 54, who lives in the village of Kuala Satong, across the river from Edi\u2019s house, wanted to take us to the scene of a recent attack on his crops. Small and muscular, he marched ahead, machete in hand. It was late morning and the sun was hot. Thwack! He chopped down some sugar cane for us to chew on.<\/p>\n An experienced farmer, he has only recently started to make money. For years, he\u2019d grown rice and only ever produced enough to feed his family of six. The land is too swampy and salty for rice, it turns out. But then, five years ago, Naha switched to oil palms. He now earns 2m to 3m rupiah for each harvest, \u201cand you can have two harvests a month. Twenty-four a year!\u201d he said. He\u2019s extended his home, sends his grandchildren to school. \u201cI feel wealthy!\u201d<\/p>\n After an hour of walking, we arrived at a hut on the riverbank, a place where he likes to rest and smoke cigarettes. His plantation of oil palms was nearby. One field was full of mature plants, the other had seedlings interspersed with bits of scrub and tangled vegetation. This was a new field he was cultivating. The shoots had been torn and flattened; more than 50 had been eaten, a third of his crop. \u201cWho will compensate me?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n Farmers feel a certain resentment towards orangutans, says Paul Thung, director of conservation at Planet Indonesia, an NGO based in West Kalimantan. Orangutans can wreck their crops, but farmers are not allowed to shoot them as they would a macaque, which is recognised as a pest by the government.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m angry,\u201d Iskandar said. As was his sister. \u201cIf there is no replacement for the seedlings,\u201d she warned in a voicemail to Yiari, \u201csomething unwarranted might occur.\u201d She continued: \u201cWe do not own a large plantation, and we do not own any other land. So, please, we ask for your immediate help.\u201d<\/p>\n On my last day in Borneo, I went out on a rescue mission. It started with a call from the Orangutan Protection Unit, a rapid response unit that patrols places where orangutans are known to be a problem \u2013 20 villages at the last count. They wanted to show us an orangutan they were worried about.<\/p>\n It was still hot and humid at 5pm. We heard a rustle of leaves in the high branches and walked towards the sound. Twenty or so feet up, we glimpsed a baby orangutan clambering on its mother\u2019s back. The mother glanced down at us. She reached out and pulled branches in around her, like a cloak, and attempted to hide. Leaves and twigs dropped on to the forest floor.<\/p>\n The orangutan and her infant were in a tiny strip of 100 or so rubber trees in Tempurukan village, a 40-minute drive from Ketapang. There were houses with picket fences and bougainvillaea in terracotta pots. She was close to a main road, with a petrol station and an outdoor cafe.<\/p>\n This mother was known to Yiari as October. She had been spotted nine times in the previous four months, once by the owner of a jackfruit plantation. \u201cMove it!\u201d the owner had told Yiari. There was a risk that the animal would come to harm. \u201cPeople put poison in fruit quite frequently,\u201d Argitoe told me. He had relayed his concerns to the West Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation<\/a> Agency, which oversees the capture and movement of animals. It had visited the site and agreed: the orangutans needed to be moved.<\/p>\n Mama Ris prior to translocation last year. Photograph: Fergus Thomas<\/p>\n On the day of our trip to the rescue site, Argitoe was holding a tranquilliser gun. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to rescue a mother and child,\u201d he said. There was a risk the baby would get hit by the dart aimed at its mother.<\/p>\n We were joined by trackers, field staff, an official from the conservation agency \u2013 his senior position reflected in superior footwear \u2013 plus motorbikes and two pickup trucks, each with a cage. A cameraman was filming Argitoe for his YouTube channel, where his words would be dubbed into American English. The group of 25 or so was predominantly male, apart from Fina Fadiah, the vet, and Maratul Halimnafiah, known as Fia, a student trainee.<\/p>\n Up in the trees, October was scared. She showed her fear by emitting \u201ckiss-squeaks\u201d \u2013 a sharp sound made by pursing her lips to form a trumpet. In her stress, she peed. Argitoe followed as she moved from branch to branch trying to escape. Trackers cut a path through the undergrowth. Argitoe stopped and looked up. The infant was spread-eagled on its mother\u2019s back. He had to wait for it to clamber on to her chest to lessen the risk of hitting it. Every time October shifted, Argitoe followed with his gun. And every time Arigitoe moved, he was followed by a dozen others. \u201cQuick, quick, quick, come quickly!\u201d he shouted. We heard a sudden cry \u2013 \u201cArrrrgh arggggh!\u201d \u2013 someone had swung a machete into a bees\u2019 nest.<\/p>\n Finally, a dart hit October. She started to fall, but the effect of the sedative was delayed and, with one hand, she tried to hold on to a tangle of vines. A net was held out, about a metre above the ground. October fell into it. But her baby was gone.<\/p>\n The orangutan was carried to the clearing, where she was monitored and a blood sample taken. She was about 20 years old and weighed 35kg. She was still lactating. Fina found her microchip, and declared that this wasn\u2019t October. This was Mama Ris. She had been moved before. She may have returned to this spot because land was being cleared in her new location.<\/p>\n Mama Ris\u2019 daughter, before being moved. Photograph: Fergus Thomas<\/p>\n Half an hour or so later, Fina was checking on the baby orangutan, now unconscious. Argitoe had used a blow pipe \u2013 an air rifle is too powerful for something so small. She was about three years old, and weighed 2.5kg. Her stained teeth showed she was eating bark. There wasn\u2019t much fruit and she was hungry.<\/p>\n Mama Ris was in a cage lined with foliage. She had been given drugs to keep her calm. Meanwhile, Fia tried to wake the baby by tickling her nostrils with a blade of grass. Mother and baby were reunited while still drugged and groggy. They were driven in the same cage to a restored peatland forest, 30 minutes away. Porters carried the cage deep into the forest. At times the swampy water was knee deep. When the team found a good spot to release them, mother and baby clambered out and climbed up a tree. The day had been an ordeal for them. Even watching it unfold had been pretty upsetting.<\/p>\n Yiari does all the research it can about the best place to release an orangutan. But things don\u2019t always go to plan. A couple of weeks after the relocation of an orangutan who had been electrocuted by a pylon, he was spotted lying by the side of a road, having been electrocuted again. He recovered and was rereleased in April 2023, deeper in the forest, this time. He hasn\u2019t been seen since.<\/p>\n Llano S\u00e1nchez has spent 20 years trying to help orangutans whose home is being destroyed by palm oil companies. She doesn\u2019t believe translocation is ultimately the answer. \u201cWe will run out of forest to move the orangutans to,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n A big challenge is to come up with alternative schemes that can put as much money in people\u2019s pockets as oil palms, without further harming orangutans. Compensation against damage, say, can backfire as it\u2019s hard to prove orangutans are to blame. Macaques are just as destructive.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are so many very smart ideas,\u201d says Thung. For instance, farmers could grow coffee instead of palm oil, a crop that orangutans dislike. But it takes a great deal of money and effort to make changes. \u201cWorking with communities in a meaningful, in-depth, collaborative way takes a lot of investment, a lot of time.\u201d<\/p>\n But for now, all is not lost. \u201cThere are still many orangutans out there,\u201d Llano S\u00e1nchez said. \u201cThe main thing is to protect what we have left. Because giving up hope isn\u2019t going to help anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center<\/a><\/p>\n Discover a selection of the Guardian\u2019s finest longform writing, in one beautifully illustrated magazine<\/a>. In this issue, you\u2019ll find stories about how private equity is plundering the world and what it\u2019s like growing up in a family of Nazis. Plus: why do we think the perfect buggy will make us better parents? Order your copy here<\/a>, delivery charges may apply<\/p>\n Listen to our podcasts here<\/a> and sign up to the long read weekly email here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The banana skins were an ominous sign. 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