Saving the "Man of the Forest"

Youngsters roll on the ground, tussling, teasing each other and gleefully aping their elders. They climb the tropical trees with abandon and plunge happily into cooling water--holding their noses when they dunk. Despite the similarities, the equatorial playground, at the edge of a 12,000-acre forest preserve on Borneo is no boys' camp. It is the Malaysian state of Sabah's experimental center for the rehabilitation of orangutans.

The orangutan--Malay for "man of the forest"--is badly in need of a helping hand. Once these big red-haired primates (an adult male stands about 5 ft. tall, weighs 150 lbs.) inhabited the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra by the tens of thousands. Today, only 6,000 or so are left. Spreading farms and logging operations have driven the survivors ever deeper into the rain forest; native hunters shoot the mothers and carry off the young orangutans for illegal sale to foreign zoos (price: as much as $4,000 apiece). To save this vanishing Asian cousin of Africa's gorilla and chimpanzee, Sabah state officials are seizing young orangutans from poachers and trying to retrain them for the wild.

Civilized Taste. It is no simple matter. Like human babies, the orangs are prone to disease, require fussy diets and demand constant coddling. "They pull your ears affectionately," says Sabah Conservator of Forests Thomas Bayles, "and they go to bed hugging each other." Worse yet, they take all too eagerly to the comforts of domestication, quickly develop a fondness for such civilized delicacies as salt, pineapples and chicken eggs. Despite efforts to toughen them up by letting them run loose, the adolescent orangs swing down from their treetop nests when it rains and sleep in their dry cages.

When they are finally strong enough to stray from the clearing occasionally, Ranger James Wong and his staff carry them deep into the forest, abandoning them there along with a day's supply of food. But the orangs usually come scrambling home shortly after the food is gone. A few days later, Wong hauls them off again, and sometimes several wearying times after that, because the orangs stubbornly refuse to give up the easy living with their human friends.

Still, Wong's jungle boot camp has been a partial success. So far, eight "graduates" have not reappeared in months; yet some orangs, like a young female named Joan, seem unable to make up their minds. She mated in the wild but came back to have her baby. Now she wanders in and out of the camp with little Joan clinging to her side, enjoying the best of both worlds.

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