How much do we know about orangutans?
Recently I visited orangutans at Camp Leakey run by Orangutan Foundation International (OFI). The long history and inspirational work of OFI touched all of us. I’ll tell you the story in another post. First, I wanted to share the photos of amazing orangutans. It’s hard not to appreciate them while watching how they move and react. We even saw a couple of wild orangutans on the boat which was an extremely rare experience as I’ve heard. However, the main event was at the two camps at Camp Leakey. Visitors can join the rangers during feeding time to watch orangutans. As Dr. Briute said, Camp Leakey, is ‘NYC for the country folks’. Meaning, you wouldn’t want to live there but would want to visit once in a while.
Here I’m sharing interesting facts that I learned during the visit, and part of the photos. Believe it or not, I took 900 photos of orangutans. It was quite a hard journey to pick out the good photos.
Facts about orangutans you didn’t know
- Orangutan means ‘the person of the forest’ in the Malay language. Oran means person, utan means forest. Technically, orang utan (a space in the middle) would be the right way to say it.
- They like durians the best, better than bananas (surprise!).
- Orangutans and human genomes are 97% identical.
- For the first few years of his/her life, a young orangutan holds tight to his/her mother’s body as she moves through the forest canopy. The moms keep their babies for 7-8 years.
- The chick pad is a sign of the dominant male but not all males have it. They go deep in the jungle for 3-6 months and come out all grown up. People still don’t know exactly about the process.
- Orangutans have eight times stronger strength than humans.
- They have an attention span of a four-year-old kid. So they respond better to a dominant tone.
- Orangutans usually eat fruits and young leaves from trees.
- Orangutans are in danger because of illegal logging and palm oil plantation. Also, people kill their mothers to capture baby orangutans.
