“Donny became part of the family… eating human food, drinking tea, my grandma even dressed him in kids clothes so he wouldn’t get cold. We all slept in the same bed, huddled together…”
Efan, Ranger
Photo by Efan
I spent much of my childhood in my Dad’s village, a very small Dayak settlement, with less than ten houses and ten families. There were so many Orangutans in the forest around the village back then. One day we saw a baby Orangutan up in the tree, maybe one or two years old, crying and alone, without his mother. My grandma lured him down with fruit and we brought him inside. We called him Donny.
After a while, Donny became part of the family and habituated to us, eating human food, drinking tea, and my grandma even dressed him in kids clothes so he wouldn’t get cold. We all slept in the same bed, huddled together, and I remember he was very warm, two or three degrees warmer than any of us.
We’d play together with the kids from the village, wrestling and rolling around, and even though I was eleven or twelve years old, and Donny was still small, he was so much stronger than us, you really felt it when he gripped you.
Orangutans don’t understand our language, but they are so similar to us.
They get annoyed when you tease them or take their things, they cry when they’re upset, and they laugh when you tickle them.
Donny was living with us for about four years. Then one day, a female Orangutan with a very small baby, maybe less than a year old, started coming to the village, swinging around up in the trees. Donny would watch them from down in the house and later would go out and try to climb up and interact with her, and she’d be reaching down to him. My grandmother or I would go to get Donny to come back, and he wouldn’t resist, but he’d be looking around trying to see where she was. We didn’t know then what was on their minds.
After the female had visited many times, Donny was up in the tree one day and just started going with her and her baby. My Dad and his family went out to try and find them, but we never saw Donny again after that. She must have adopted him. I was really upset, because I felt like I’d lost one of my brothers.
Photo by Efan
After that, the area sold its land to the palm oil companies and the village was devastated by the river mining nearby. I went there ten years ago and it was nothing like what I remembered from my childhood. The river is very shallow because of the mining. My family is still there, but their life is totally different now. There are no orangutans. It’s uninhabitable for them since the forest is a monoculture of palm trees. It’s so sad to see that I don’t want to even stay one night there.
I learned much later when I started to work at the park that, while it’s not common, female Orangutans are known to adopt other babies.
I think Donny was lucky: with a human surrogate family, he would never have been able to live in the wild, so I’m happy he got that chance.
His biological mother was almost certainly killed, maybe by falling timber where they cleared the trees, or poachers, or even Dayak hunting for meat, since Orangutan was part of their diet back then.
The babies in the OFI facility sometimes remind me of Donny. When I see two babies from different mothers playing, I’ll get my camera out, or just stay and watch for a while.
Photo by Efan
Years later, when I was considering what to study, I had the option of Forestry or Automotive. Even though I was really into cars at that time, something made me choose Forestry. When I was assigned to this park, and I had my first encounter with Orangutan babies, it made sense, like homecoming, like it had come full circle to what I experienced as a boy. I’ve been learning more deeply about Orangutans ever since. I can move to other national parks with my work if I want to, but I like it here, it feels like where I am meant to be.
Photo by Efan
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