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The long read: As new settlers clear their forest habitat, the apes are coming into conflict with humans. But simply moving them to another

Since the 1970s, hundreds of hectares of forest in Borneo have been cleared to grow rice and pineapples and, more recently, oil palms. The large spiky palms with their red, bulbous, oil-rich fruit have become the main cash crop in this once densely forested area.

Since the transmigration scheme opened up this area to new settlers in 2016, the orangutans’ forest habitat has been disappearing, and the settlers have found their crops and gardens invaded by unwelcome visitors.

Most of us see orangutans as adorable, with their tufts of red hair and solemn eyes. They are known as devoted mothers. Their hands are very like ours. The renowned primatologist Biruté Galdikas once remarked: “Orangutans have souls, absolutely.” But they are also big, smart and strong, and locals can find them scary, says Karmele Llano Sánchez from Yiari, a charity based in West Kalimantan that works across Indonesia to protect orangutans and their habitat. The charity had been receiving a stream of messages about orangutans taking bites out of precious fruit, and scaring children. There was no reason for alarm, Yiari told callers. Orangutans are generally peaceful, and only become dangerous if threatened or cornered. Orangutans had not directly attacked humans, according to Yiari (though there had been occasions where orangutans had charged at people); but humans had attacked orangutans.

As the population of southern and western Kalimantan has increased, and farms and new settlements have expanded, conservationists have been sending out rescue parties to catch orangutans that have come into conflict with humans. The apes are tranquillised and moved to a more remote area, where they are released back into the wild. This approach has become common, but according to a recent study, which triggered fierce debate, moving orangutans does more harm than good. In their new environment, they may struggle to find food, and get attacked by orangutans who view them as intruders. Many are moved more than 30 miles away, but some captured animals make their way back to their original home, the authors claim, even when their home territory has been violently altered. The solution, said Julie Sherman, the director of conservation non-profit Wildlife Impact and a lead author of the paper, is not to remove animals to alien territory, but for humans and orangutans to live alongside each other.

“When you’ve got farmers shooting at orangutans, or the forest on fire, what should we do?” asked Gail Campbell-Smith, a primatologist who works at Yiari. “Should we leave the animal to die? What should we do in that moment in time? Moving them is the last resort when we’ve done everything else that we can.”

When Llano Sánchez first visited Kalimantan as a vet in 2005, the drive to convert land into oil palm plantations was well under way. She encountered the roaring of chainsaws and vehicles, crashing trees and people yelling. The bulk of palm oil expansion was between 2001 and 2012, when powerful corporations descended, and things really started to speed up. At the peak in West Kalimantan in 2012, an area of ancient forest slighty less than the size of Greater London was cleared in one year.

“It was crazy,” she said. “So many orangutans were being displaced and wiped out.” A lean and slight woman in her late 40s, Llano Sánchez speaks forcefully, as if she’s running out of time to get her message across. She showed me a video shot in the district of Ketapang, West Kalimantan, in 2013. Orangutans were clambering around among felled branches, charred tree stumps and upended root balls in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The place where the video was shot is now mile after mile of evenly spaced trees, each topped with a dense crown of fronds. Palms are planted nine metres apart and the fruit is harvested by hand, with a machete, chisel or long-handled sickle, which is used to prise the fruit bunches from the body of the tree. The oil extracted from the flesh and kernel is highly versatile, turning up in about half of all supermarket products globally, from pizza dough to lipsticks.

Indonesia is now the biggest palm oil producer in the world, responsible for 59% of global output, worth about £26bn a year.

Besides the major commercial plantations, villagers in very out-of-the-way places are clearing pieces of land to create their own palm oil smallholdings. Oil palms have changed fortunes. Villagers have been able to fix up their houses, buy a motorbike, set up a hair salon.

Despite pressure from environmental campaigners, it is not easy to prevent illegal deforestation. The palm oil industry is enormous, supply chains are complex and include independent farmers who have as little as two-hectare plots. These smallholders mostly sell their fruit to companies for processing. The number of smallholders clearing ground to plant palms is growing fast, and they are largely unmonitored. Smallholders are not just converting tiny patches of existing cropland, according to a study of their environmental impact. People are avoiding the regulations that restrict companies and finding pristine forests to slash open.

The next day, I had coffee with a group of women in a nearby village who patrol the forest checking for wildfires, which are a big problem in this area. It is much cheaper for farmers and developers to clear land by burning down trees than to hire a digger. Set up by Yiari four years ago, the Power of Mama is a surveillance team of 118 women from eight local villages who take turns to patrol the forest on motorbikes; some are being trained as firefighters.

Protected forests are supposed to keep the area as wild and shielded from human activity as possible. But this hasn’t been the case. The strip of trees in the buffer zone surrounding the perimeter of Gunung Palung has been whittled down over the past few decades from a width of 10km to 2km. In 2003, illegal loggers began cutting down trees within the actual research site where orangutans are monitored.

Orangutans forced out of their home territory quickly get into trouble. Early one morning last summer, a baby orangutan was spotted clinging to the tall slender trunk of a jabon tree, half a mile or so from Edi’s farm. An hour later, the mother was found, hidden in tall grasses nearby. She had a wound 5cm deep on her back. The weapon, likely a spear of some sort, had penetrated her kidney. It took a week for her to die. The baby was taken to a centre for rehabilitation and eventually released into the forest, alone.

As climate breakdown and human populations have brought chaos to the natural world, translocation has become a core conservation tool. It can be used to restore almost-extinct wildlife (kakapo in New Zealand); return a species to where it used to be (beavers in Great Britain); or move it to somewhere it’s never been before (western swamp tortoises in Australia).

In conservation circles, translocation is controversial, particularly if the reason the wildlife is being moved is because it’s come to be seen as a “problem” to people: that is, it has wrecked harvests, eaten livestock or scared children. “It’s a very human response to move things out of our way that we don’t want there, but it’s about our interests and desires, as opposed to the orangutans’,” says Julie Sherman, who is based in Portland, Oregon. “Globally, [translocation] is not generally an effective way to resolve conflicts with wild terrestrial animals.”

In 2015, Sherman and her colleague Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores, became interested in the fact that translocation was being promoted to protect orangutans in Indonesia. In the course of their research, they found that between 2005 and 2022, at least 988 orangutans were captured for translocation in Indonesia. The mechanics of translocation, which usually means uprooting an orangutan from familiar territory and framing it as a “rescue”, is what most worries Sherman and Wich. NGOs increasingly rely on Instagram and TikTok to fundraise and engage with the public, and the drama of a “rescue” is great for engagement. “What is really disturbing is seeing videos of animals fleeing towards a forest and people continue to pursue it for whatever reason,” said Sherman. “It’s very hard on the animal.”

As a species, orangutans seem particularly ill-suited to being moved. Wild orangutans have a mental map of the forest built up over many years. They know which trees are fruiting and when. Translocation is an alarming intervention in their social fabric. Sherman speaks about orangutans in somewhat human terms: an older male orangutan is a “grandfather”; they have “friends”, “neighbours”. “You are pulling that animal away from its family and friends and putting it in a group of strangers,” she said. When relocated, they’re at risk of being attacked by hostile animals on whose territory they arrive with no warning, said Wich, who was also on the call. “These are highly intelligent animals, so it must be very traumatic for them.”

No one really knows what happens to wild orangutans after they’ve been moved. Tracking devices to know how they get on are expensive and invasive. Fitting a global positioning system tracker, say, requires surgery, plus a two-week recovery period. “There just isn’t the human capacity to follow all these animals, the funding or the time,” said Sherman. She asked: should we be moving animals we aren’t equipped to monitor?

Wich and Sherman believe that, rather than moving them to unfamiliar areas, more effort is required to achieve peaceful coexistence. “It’s really key that we work with local communities and companies to find a solution,” said Wich. Sherman mentioned financial compensation and insurance as possible solutions. Wich and Sherman developed a programme of pilot workshops where villagers talk with local NGOs and decide how they might live alongside orangutans without killing or removing them.

Campbell-Smith has been working at Yiari for 15 years. She was the first to study orangutans in a “human-dominated landscape” in Sumatra, and made detailed observations of how orangutan behaviour changed around humans. Rather than rising and retiring with the sun, for instance, the orangutans would lie in their nests until late afternoon, “waiting for humans to leave”. Their diet had adapted to include oil palm shoots. “An odd one, as that is not a tree that orangutans usually like,” she said. They also spent more time on the ground. Orangutans are normally arboreal. They don’t swing by their arms from tree to tree at speed like monkeys, but “tree-sway”. They use branches like a pole vaulter, letting their weight bow the branch to propel them in tremendous arcs through the air. “They move from tree A to tree B using their bodies to swing,” Campbell-Smith explained. But they couldn’t go to tree B, because it had been cut down. So, they had to go to tree C and to get to tree C they were forced on to the ground.” They are slow and lumbering on all fours, and when they’re out of their protected areas, they are vulnerable to humans who want to kill them.

Llano Sánchez doesn’t disagree with Wich and Sherman that capturing and moving orangutans is invasive and frightening for the animals, but in the moment, they see no alternative. “We are dealing with emergencies,” she said. “We are on the frontline.”

Llano Sánchez has spent 20 years trying to help orangutans whose home is being destroyed by palm oil companies. She doesn’t believe translocation is ultimately the answer. “We will run out of forest to move the orangutans to,” she said.

A big challenge is to come up with alternative schemes that can put as much money in people’s pockets as oil palms, without further harming orangutans. Compensation against damage, say, can backfire as it’s hard to prove orangutans are to blame. Macaques are just as destructive.

“There are so many very smart ideas,” says Thung. For instance, farmers could grow coffee instead of palm oil, a crop that orangutans dislike. But it takes a great deal of money and effort to make changes. “Working with communities in a meaningful, in-depth, collaborative way takes a lot of investment, a lot of time.”

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