Southeast Asian fires quicken orangutans' demise

Confiscated baby orangutans 2.7 M / 33 sec. / 320x240 1.1 M / 33 sec. / 160x120 QuickTime movie

February 25, 1998
Web posted at: 2:46 p.m. EST (1946 GMT)

EAST KALIMANTAN, Indonesia (CNN) -- The Indonesian and Malaysian orangutan populations, which are dwindling because their habitats are disappearing, also are victims of the flames and smoke from chronic Southeast Asian forest fires, an environmental group said Wednesday.

"The orangutan is already under heavy threat from forest clearing and hunting," said Barita Manullang, a World Wide Fund for Nature orangutan conservation adviser. "These fires may well be the final push towards extinction."

Last year's fires reportedly caused an estimated $1.3 billion in damage in Southeast Asia. Clouds of smoky haze settled over much of the region as more than 15,000 square kilometers (6,000 square miles) of forest were obliterated. Much of that was prime orangutan habitat.

Fires this year, exacerbated by drought, are causing more devastation.

Orangutans that manage to escape the fires sometimes perish anyway. Frightened and hungry, they look for food in farmers' fields only to be attacked by machetes, clubs and chain saws wielded by villagers trying to protect their crops.

Most of the fires are set by farmers trying to clear land for agriculture and companies that burn jungles after logging to make way for new palm oil plantations.

Some orangutans are killed so their young can be seized and sold as pets -- but the fires are blamed for the deaths.

In one incident in East Kalimantan, a government rescue team found an orangutan about 1 1/2 years old. A farmer denied he killed the mother to capture the baby, saying he found it alone in his rice field as forest fires raged nearby.

Government officials, however, are suspicious. They say an orangutan's mother would never surrender her baby as long as she's alive. Orangutans are protected animals in Indonesia, so officials take the baby orangutan away.

The great red apes of Asia are the world's largest animals to live mainly in trees. An adult male can be well over 5 feet tall and weigh more than 300 pounds. Females are less than half that size and usually carry a dependent youngster.

Orangutans are so finely adapted to the rain forest, they cannot survive in the wild without it. And the forests that once covered vast regions of Southeast Asia are now limited to shrinking areas surrounded by human settlements and plantations or penetrated by logging and mining concessions.

The orangutans' habitat is estimated to have shrunk by more than 80 percent in the last 50 years, with the number of wild orangutans dropping drastically in the last decade.

Experts now say there are no more than 25,000 wild orangutans surviving in the forests.

"These fires are probably the worst thing that has happened to the orangutan species in the last hundred years," said Birute Galdikas of the Orangutan Foundation International.

Correspondent Gary Strieker contributed to this report.

Related stories:

• New Indonesian forest fires raise smog concerns - Feb. 25, 1998
• Orangutans, saved from fire, return to freedom - February 11, 1998
• Fires, drought in Indonesia threaten orangutans - October 21, 1997

Related sites:

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• Balikpapan Orangutan Society
• Orangutan Foundation International
• Orang Utan Page
• Indonesia Environmental Impact Management Agency

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.

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