t’s nearly time to Go Orange for Orangutans! Are you ready to help raise vital funds for orangutans in the wild? Your support and donations really do make a difference.
Last October you helped us raise £15,000 for our orangutan conservation projects. The funds went directly towards our projects working day in, day out to protect this amazing animal.
The money enabled us to conduct new research using 15 specialist cameras that were vital in studying and protecting orangutans in the wild. Below is an update from HUTAN- Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project (KOCP), a project that we work closely with, that purchased the camera traps which went towards a new research programme.
“Thanks to the generous support of Chester Zoo‘s 2013 Go Orangecampaign, we on the orangutan research team at KOCP are very happy to share these photos from camera traps purchased with these funds. The images below show a wild female orangutan with a clinging baby ‘captured’ just after sunset (18:30) by the infrared setting, moving from the oil palm back to the forest.
“Shown below, is the same female and baby, we believe, from the same camera trap at 17:40 on a different day. In this area, wild orangutans are especially vigilant. This makes it more difficult to follow them in the same ways we are able to within contiguous forest. So we are very excited by the insights these camera traps are already providing about the time of day, age and sex/class using this border region!
“The objective of this project is to understand more about orangutan movement patterns and use of the protected forest – oil palm boundary region. The KOCP study site in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary is bordered by monoculture oil palm agriculture. Since most wild orangutans live in increasingly mixed-use and human-transformed landscapes, understanding how this highly intelligent great ape is attempting to adapt to these changes, we believe, is key to being able to support their ongoing viability in the wild. With the help of Chester Zoo, and all the Go Orange campaign participants, we work together to Act for Wildlife!
Best wishes and many thanks from all the orangutan research team at KOCP.”