Being a surrogate mother for orphan orangutans
Working with orangutans will always be pleasantful and is a wonderful experience for me to have. Now I work with orphan orangutans in the rehabiitation center to have them ready for the reintroduction into the wild.
Basically we teach them to have forest skills in order for them to survive and thrive in the wild. And being their teachers is new to me!
We have three classes of orphans, divided by the age and the skills they need to acquire at that age. In the morning they wake up, the babies will get milk and breakfast, meanwhile the infants and jouveniles only get breakfast. They’ll get low proteins breakfast in the morning so they’ll starve and go looking for food in the forest. In the late afternoon, they get snacks and dinner.
I always reflect the current behaviour they have now with the behaviour they should show in the wild-forest (release site) later, ones of those are climbing the tree and use the tree as a safe and comfort place. However, human-raised orangutans can never get the same education from the wild-born ones. Humans are handicapped with what they only have. We don’t have long fingers to hold on to the branch, to climb, to swing by the canopy like they do. Meanwhile, wild mother orangutans always carry their babies as they move from one canopy to the others.
In that way, we can only stimulate the orphans to behave like that, to be always up in the tree, build a nest, forage for food, roam broadly.
Another case, wild-born orangutans will always have one mother who’ll take care of them. But with humans, they will have several mothers, because we can’t always nurture them all the time. We have different lifestyle and therefore it’ll affects their psychological aspect as well. Sometimes they need to share the mom, if we don’t have enough caretakers in a day. I believe it’ll very difficult for them, to not have one exclusive mother only for them.
Deep inside, I always want for them to have the best and most similar education they can get from the wild mother, but us, humans, cannot to that. The least we can do is climbing the not so high tree, teach them how to build a sleeping nest and if we want to go higher we need to put our tree climbing gear, which not everyone can do that.
In orangutans’ forest school here, we want to provide and give the maximum efforts but they can never get 100% ideal education from humans. Even when they want to play the way they play, we won’t reach their standards and they need to understand that humans are not they should be having social contact with, but they need to play with their mothers!
Being a surrogate mother for an orphan is challenging and full of responsibility. It’s like you raise a child but you talk different language. We need to think how we can deliver our messages and they understand what we mean.
But I love every second of it!
