Dawn in this Borneo rainforest marks the start of jungle day-care.
A team of babysitters carry young orang-utans out to their playground, a 62-hectare protected
reserve.
They'll spend the day learning the basic skills to one day survive in the wild
If they come in at the age of about one, it will take about seven years.
So it's almost like preparing children for the outside world?
Well yes, it just goes a little bit faster. I mean, they graduate a little bit faster
than what children do, and they're not quite as expensive too.
Lone Droescher-Nielsen is a former flight attendant from Denmark who came here 13 years
ago to see the jungle and fell in love with its animals. She now runs a rescue and rehabilitation
centre for orang-utans that have fallen prey to the dangers of man.
It's a totally different way of living than they would be if they were with the mothers.
But we try the best that we can to give them lots of love and attention. There's lots of
bickering going on, a lot of jealousy between them, but they still seem to cope quite well,
because they get love from the others as well. They have their social structure that they
get within the group. They have to nurture them by hand; feeding
them by healthy food, making sure they have fresh milk and dealing with the trying demands
of temperamental infants. She's just getting upset because her milk
is not ready yet, just like children in the supermarket when they can't have the chocolate.
Having a tantie! Tantrum... Now you've got it, you don't have
to cry any more. All too often they have to deal with problems
that no infant should go through. This is Kessey. She had her hand cut off while
they were killing her mother. They simply cut her mother to death with machetes.
She's doing perfectly fine actually. She's taking a little bit longer than some of the
others to climb bigger trees. But she is starting to climb up trees. She just uses her stump
to hold on. Because she's got three other limbs it's a bit easier, we would be a bit
more handicapped.
Now as cute as these babies are, the sobering fact is that they are all orphans.
Their mothers were killed by plantation owners who regard them as a pest
By some estimates the orang-utans habitat in Borneo is being cleared even faster than the Amazon
Much of it in pursuit of a household product found in every supermarket and almost certainly your own kitchen shelves,
palm oil
Every day, the province of Central Kalimantan reverberates to the sound of bulldozed jungle.
The vast forests of Borneo are the centre of a frenzied clearing program for palm plantations.
It's cheap to plant, quick to grow and the wine-red fruit yields what many tout as green,
renewable oil -- useful for everything from cooking oil to truck fuel.
Much of it ends up in supermarkets as a cheap food additive,
in hundreds of products from bread and biscuits to crisps and oatcakes.
It's sometimes labelled palm oil, often just vegetable oil, with no warnings as to whether it's been grown sustainably on abandoned farmland
or from bulldozed forest.
Few outside Borneo realise just how much damage has been done to the wildlife.
Sinasingham is a 73-year-old Dayak leader who grew up in the forests. He now fears the orang-utans will disappear entirely.
Sinasingham: In past times there were many orang-utans living freely in the wild.
built their nests in the tops of trees. After the forest was cleared, they cannot
live any more. So please do not plant new palm oil plantations.
Borneo's forests have long been logged for timber, but the advent of palm oil has changed everything.
Orang-utans, gibbons, macaques and bears could
survive in the secondary forests left after the best wood was removed. But the practice
of clearing everything has left animals without any of their customary habitat.
Palm oil is totally destructive. They're cutting down primary forest,
totally bulldozing ever single tree down and they're taking the top layer of the soil off too
There is nothing left. The seeds that might be there are gone
Environmental groups claim some five million hectares of the orang-utans' habitat have been destroyed for palm oil.
When the forest disappears, instinct leads the apes back to what used to be their homes.
They cling to any stump in the cleared plantations, unable to understand where their food has gone.
It's left to privately-funded NGOs to rescue them before plantation workers kill them or sell the babies as pets.
Lone Droescher-Nielsen's group is BOS -- the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation.
Surviving precariously on donations, it sends teams to drug and capture lost orang-utans and eventually release them back into the wild.
We now work with almost all plantations in Central Kalimantan.
Some are more willing to call us - because it doesn't cost them anything --
and for them I guess they think it's a better image that they're at least trying to help the orang-utans.
This plantation, a two-hour drive from the reserve, sees itself as a model operation.
The manager, Yohanes Budisantoso, says it only grows palms on land that was already cleared.
Yohanes: Initially in the area bordering on the jungle there were one or two orang-utans,
but because the BOS Foundation is here and we have a good relationship with them, if there are signs of them or an attack we call and report it.
But even here their workers have been known to panic and kill the apes.
From that particular plantation we have had three orang-utans they've tried to catch themselves that have died,
simply because they're using, you know, either machetes --
and they almost cut the hands off a female orang-utan, and she bled to death before we got there.
BOS has compiled a horrific and ever-growing catalogue of the casualties of palm oil plantations.
We estimate about 5,000 orang-utans are killed at least every year.
In another five or six years, if we don't do something now, if we don't watch out the orang-utan will be gone in the wild.
We estimate about 5,000 orang-utans are killed at least every year.
This is not a natural disaster. This is a human caused disaster
and it's like an emergency we have here now. It's really bad
As I say, thousands of orang-utans are being killed. It's the saddest thing that you can imagine.
The man who signs the palm oil concessions is the provincial governor, Augustin Teras Nerang.
He denies licences are granted for virgin forest,
insisting only land that's already been cleared is available for plantations.