Fun in Borneo: friendly natives (non-homo sapiens)
These two orangutans are in the reserve near Kuching. The reserve started as a place where orphaned orang babies were to be rehabilitated so they could fend for themselves in the forest. (They were orphaned because poachers shot their mothers so they could sell them to people who wanted the babies as pets. The babies were eventually intercepted and brought to the rehab center.) Baby orangutans stay with their mothers for ten years before they’re ready to live on their own, so rearing these babies and training them to climb, fend for themselves and be wild is no small undertaking. Apparently they’ve managed to return 11 rescued orangs to the wild, and they have reproduced until there are now 26 in the area. The rangers put food out for them daily, but the apes don’t come unless the forest food is more boring than bananas.
We also saw Irrawaddy dolphins. They have small round heads, no elongated beaks like California dolphins. Highly endangered, but the guys who run the river wildlife cruise know where to find them.
Proboscis monkeys nest in the trees over the mangrove swamps at dusk. I think this picture is of some at the Singapore Zoo, the only place outside Borneo to cultivate these creatures successfully – again, highly endangered but totally protected in Sarawak. They have four-chambered stomachs, like cows, to enable them to digest the salty plants they live among. They can’t digest sugar.
The cruise showed us some fireflies that cluster around rubber trees and eat the sap – they glow a gentle blue, so the trees along the river looked like Christmas trees in a fog. And there were Silver Leaf monkeys as well, although they were farther away and not as cute as the Spectacled Leaf monkeys we saw in Langkawi. And we saw a small crocodile perched in a tree, which was aggravated by the pilots’ lights and slithered into the river. Here’s a bigger specimen, preserved at the Sarawak Natural History Museum. Crocodiles (same as the Australian Salty) are protected in Sarawak as well, except for those who make a habit of dining on the people who live along the rivers. This one was found to have a watch in its belly:
And of course there were some cats. Not in Kuching, but in a longhouse village an hour away. They’re on traditional hand-woven mats and bamboo floors. The one with the short tail is not a victim of violence – southeast Asia has a lot of short-tailed cats around.
