Help to Monitor and Protect Orangutans in Borneo

We are extremely excited to report back with our updates! 

In early July, the BOS Foundation camera trap team headed back to the Bukit Batikap Protection Forest to install the 30 new Reconyx cameras, which after a long journey from the USA had arrived safely at Nyaru Menteng. 

From our starting point at the BOS Foundation Orangutan Rehabilitation Center at Nyaru Menteng in Central Kalimantan, it takes three days to reach Batikap using a combination of car, boat, back to a car and another boat and so on. Batikap is quite literally in the center of Borneo and logistically challenging to reach. This makes it perfect for a newly reintroduced orangutan population, but a little less perfect for us to reach! Although it was the dry season, it was incredibly rainy and despite the delays we faced with rivers being too high for the vehicles to cross at various points, we finally made it back to camp at the end of day three with our precious cargo intact. The BOS Foundation Post Release Monitoring (PRM) team were there to welcome us with hot food and coffee and it was wonderful to be back in camp after such a long time due to the global COVID travel restrictions.

We wasted no time in getting straight into fieldwork and over the next week, come rain or shine, we spent every day in the field carefully selecting new camera locations, focusing on “high traffic” orangutan areas such as river crossing points, nesting and feeding trees and overall areas where we believe we can maximise capturing orangutan images. Only time will tell if this is the case, however our study design is flexible and we have the option of moving cameras to different parts of the forest over the coming months. 

Batikap is a truly stunning forest with a wealth of wildlife. Despite our packed schedule deploying cameras, every day we saw wild primates including red langurs, white fronted langurs, macaques and gibbons. Each morning the gibbons would wake us at 4.30-5 am with their songs as they called out to other nearby pairs. It doesn’t get much better than that and they made a fantastic alarm clock! Wildlife is everywhere and we were also greeted one day by a black cobra who slithered past us quickly whilst we were tying up the boat…It was an amazing field visit and we can’t wait to see the early results and share those with you. 

Once again, the BOS Foundation camera trap team in Batikap thanks everyone for such incredible generosity and for helping us to monitor the orangutans and other wildlife species in Batikap - we honestly couldn’t do this without you!

A huge thank you to everyone who has given so generously! We honestly couldn’t do this without you and every penny given is helping us monitor and protect orangutans and the other amazing wildlife species in the Bukit Batikap Protection Forest.

The past few months have been a busy time with the BOS Foundation team focusing on post-release monitoring of the orangutans whilst preparing for our next phase of camera trapping! Thanks to your fabulous support the new Reconyx cameras we have bought arrived in Indonesia and all broken cameras were returned to the USA for repair or replacement. Insect damage had impacted quite a few cameras, which is unsurprising in a tropical rainforest and also given the fact that this equipment has been in the field for three years! But after several months of planning, we are now ready to deploy the new and repaired cameras with our revised study design. The data we have gathered over the past years has provided us with the first systematic study of all medium-large sized mammal species, including orangutans, in Batikap and this baseline information is fundamental to monitor and predict changes in the mammal community over time. Our new study will deploy cameras in “high traffic” orangutan areas. These are areas where the post-release monitoring team regularly encounters orangutans - such as river crossing hotspots and popular feeding trees, so as to record as many orangutan images as possible. Two to three cameras will be positioned at each camera trap station to maximise the chances of obtaining clear images from different angles, which will aid the team in identifying individual orangutans. As you can see from some of the example images below, it's really challenging to try to identify individuals from pictures of an eye or nose (and sometimes even just a cheek-pad or armpit!). This new data will help us improve our chances of identification of individual orangutans and monitor their long-term success.

The team is ready to start fieldwork in July and we are thrilled to be embarking on this next phase of fieldwork. In the meantime, we are continuing to analyse data from the last three years and will report back on our findings. For now, we are excited to share some of the highlights from our camera trapping project and we look forward to bringing you new images and updates from the field! Stay tuned and thank you all again for following our progress and updates!