BORNEO RAINFOREST 0°57’42.8”N 114°33’17.3”E
We sat down slowly, and I set up my tripod, watching the orangutan mother all the time as she was shaking some branches. This was her way of telling us that we should not come any closer but she would tolerate us at a distance. A message we humbly accepted. On the other hand, the baby was playful and threw itself around the branches, showing us all its climbing skills and courageously swinging itself above our heads. The name “orangutan” comes from the Indonesian word “orang hutan” which means ”forest person”. Orangutans live amongst the tall treetops and travel around 8 km each day in search of the best fruits before they build a nest to rest for the night. They spend most of their lives swinging through the forest canopy and need vast stretches of forest to find sufficient food. The babies stay with their mother until they reach the age of about seven years. They spend all their time with her, learning everything they need to know to survive. Since the babies stay with the mother for such a long time, orangutans only give birth around every 7-9 years. That is the longest birth interval of any land-living mammal, and this low reproductive rate and long generation time is one of the reasons the world population is decreasing. According to the WWF, deforestation and hunting are the biggest threats to orangutans. In Borneo, they estaimate that around 220,000 sq km of forest will be lost between 2010 and 2030 – that’s almost 30% of its total land area or over the size of the entire United Kingdom. This is mainly through the invasion of agriculture and infrastructure. Forest fires are also becoming more frequent and these result from an interaction between farming of oil palms and climate change where the dry season is becoming longer. They estimate that over 100,000 Bornean orangutans were lost between 1999 and 2015. While we sat with our mother orangutan, the choir of insects played their symphony and the sweat just poured down my back. I let the camera fire off shot after shot during the few magical hours I spent with the little orangutan family in the humid rainforest. We stayed until they decided to continue their journey, away from us towards the fruits and shelter. I had to pinch myself in gratitude for a job that gave me such magical moments. Never in my wildest fantasy could I have imagined that I would travel into the heart of the rainforests of Borneo, working with nature conservation, meeting such an amazing species. For me, it all started in 2013 after I had finished my nature conservation studies and I had recently discovered the joy of photography. I had long known that something had to be done to protect our species. When I got my first camera, I just knew what I could do for nature. By combining my passion for nature with photography, I wanted to inspire people around me to care more for our nature through what I experienced on my expeditions. Since my encounter with the orangutans on Borneo, I have had the great pleasure of documenting nature in remote places of the world. I have seen magical places with such beauty, amazing species and diversity I didn’t even know excisted. And never has it felt more important to show what I see on my expeditions, through my lens.
The old orangutan female was rescued from a forest fire caused by illegal farming and is now living in a conservation centre. She is too traumatised to ever return to wild.
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MOTHER VOLUME ONE
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