Among the Orangutans: The Birute Galdikas Story
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Featured twice on the cover of National Geographic , and the author of scores of scientific articles and reviews, Galdikas has published four books, including her autobiography, Reflections of Eden. Galdikas has also co-edited scientific volumes and served as Book Reviews editor for a primatological journal. She has supervised the field research of almost Indonesian biology students and others.
Editorial Reviews. From Publishers Weekly. As orangutans slip into further endangerment due to poaching (mothers are shot in order that babies may be taken. A student of the renowned paleontologist Dr. Louis B. Leakey and a colleague of both Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas is the world's foremost.
In recognition of her achievements, Dr. Galdikas has received, among other awards, the following:. Today, the situation facing wild orangutans is far more complicated than when Dr.
Galdikas first began her studies. As a result of poaching and habitat destruction, viable orangutan populations are on the edge of extinction and could be gone within the next 20 years outside of national parks and reserves. Understanding is the first step to action.
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Learn all about the history of OFI. An Evening with Dr. Still, she doesn't seem to have many regrets. Orangutans live wild only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The two populations have been isolated for more than a million years and are considered separate species; the Bornean orangutans are slightly larger than the Sumatran variety. Precious little was known about orangutan biology before Galdikas started studying it.
She has discovered that the tree-dwelling animals spend as much as half the day on the ground. Adult males can reach five feet tall though they rarely stand erect and weigh up to pounds. Both sexes can live 30 to 50 years. At night they sleep in nests of sticks they build high in the treetops. Galdikas also has documented that the orangs of Tanjung Puting National Park procreate about once every eight years, the longest birth interval of any wild mammal. After an eight-month pregnancy, females bear a single infant, which will remain with its mother for eight or nine years.
Galdikas has cataloged about types of fruit, flowers, bark, leaves and insects that wild orangutans eat. They even like termites.
Males usually search for food alone, while females bring along one or two of their offspring. Orangs have a keen sense of where the good stuff can be found. And she traveled in a straight line, not meandering at all until she reached the tree. Males are frighteningly unpredictable.
Birutė Galdikas
Galdikas recalls one who picked up her front porch bench and hurled it like a missile. While it was known that they use their throat pouches to make bellowing "long calls," signaling their presence to females and asserting their dominance real or imagined to other males, she discerned a call reserved especially for fellow males; roughly translated, this "fast call" says: I know you're out there and I'm ready to fight you. To collect orangutan feces samples to trace paternity and measure the reproductive success of various males.
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I ask Galdikas which orangutan riddles she has yet to solve. How far did the original males travel here in Tanjung Puting, and where did they come from? The 6, remaining orangutans can no longer travel at will because of palm oil plantations surrounding the park, all created since When she began the study, she says, "orangutans could wander to the other side of Borneo if they felt like it.
With Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall Galdikas completes the primate research triangle whose participants were mentored by the late Louis Leakey. As a fan of great ape non-fiction, I picked up this book without knowing that it was written for young people. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. No Camp Leakey party would be complete without Tom, the reigning alpha male and Thomas' older brother. Tom helps himself to an entire box of mangoes, reminding Kusasi who's boss. The orangutans carefully open the packets and sprinkle salt on their noodles. About orphaned orangs live at the year-old center, which has its own animal hospital with laboratory, operating room and medical records office.
They get lost in these palm oil plantations and they get killed. Galdikas says the killings are usually carried out by plantation workers who consider the animals pests, by local people who eat their meat and by poachers who slaughter females to capture their babies, which are then sold illegally as pets. As recently as , more than , orangutans roamed freely across the jungles of Southeast Asia and southern China.
Today an estimated 48, orangutans live in Borneo and another 6, in Sumatra. Galdikas blames people for their decline: They can be on the ground.
They can be in the canopy. I mean, they are basically big enough to not really have to worry about predators with the possible exception of tigers, maybe snow leopards. So if there were no people around, orangutans would be doing extremely well.
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To grow oil palm Elaesis guineensis in a peat swamp forest, workers typically drain the land, chop down the trees which are sold for timber and burn what's left. It's a procedure, Galdikas says, that not only has killed or displaced thousands of orangutans but also has triggered massive fires and sent huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, furthering climate change.
A hopeful sign came in when Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono partnered with nongovernmental organizations to launch a ten-year plan to protect the remaining orangutans. Without such protections against deforestation and illegal mining and logging, he predicted, "these majestic creatures will likely face extinction by But, Galdikas says, provincial officials in Central Kalimantan have done little to stop palm oil plantations from encroaching on Tanjung Puting. And Galdikas has a key advantage over the palm oil companies: The purchase was a "two-fer," she says, because it enabled her to preserve ten acres of rain forest and shut down a mismanaged zoo that appalled her.
But there were bearcats, gibbons, a proboscis monkey, even six crocodiles. A look of disgust creases her face as we inspect a concrete enclosure where a female Malay honey bear named Desi once lived. They threw food at her and never went in to clean the cage because they were afraid of her. All she had for water was a small cistern with rain water in it, covered with algae.
So I said to myself, 'I have to save this bear.
This is just inhuman. Galdikas' Borneo operation employs about men and women, including veterinarians, caregivers, security guards, forest rangers, behavioral enrichment specialists who seek to improve the physical and mental well-being of the captive orangutans , a feeding staff and eight local blind women who take turns holding the orphaned babies 24 hours a day.
About orphaned orangs live at the year-old center, which has its own animal hospital with laboratory, operating room and medical records office. Most are victims of a double whammy; they lost their forest habitat when gold miners, illegal loggers or palm oil companies cleared it. Then their mothers were killed so the babies could be captured and sold as pets. Most came to Galdikas from local authorities. Kiki, a teenager who was paralyzed from the neck down by a disease in , slept on a four-poster bed in an air-conditioned room and was pushed in a pink, blue and orange wheelchair before she died this year.
The juveniles will be released when they are between 8 and 10 years of age, or old enough to avoid being prey for clouded leopards.