Below are some summaries and excerpts from a journal I kept when I first went to Tuanan, my graduate advisor’s wild orangutan field site in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. This was my first time in Indonesia, where I met up with my graduate advisor Carel and his wife Maria, and where I first met our Dutch colleagues Serge and Tine, Perry the Dutch photographer, and our Indonesian colleagues Suci and Tatang, as well as several Indonesian assistants, many of whom I worked closely with over the next several years.
I traveled from Washington, DC to Jakarta, via Taipei, flying on China Air, since this was by far the cheapest way to get to Indonesia (presumably due to China Air’s not-so-stellar crash record, though I have since flown on China Air many times without any incident, which is more I can say for other airlines, one of which covered up a near crash of a plane I was in flying from Washington, DC to Zürich, Switzerland involving one of the Swiss presidents—but that’s a story for another time). On this trip we were on a Social Budaya visa, which is no longer possible to use for research purposes. This visa allowed us to bypass the majority of office visits that would occupy days, weeks, and in the most extreme of situations months of my time in later years.
Even on this visa, all researchers in Indonesia must provide finger prints of all 10 fingers (2x) and a plethora of red background photos of all different sizes. My favorite question asked during this process was (translated from Indonesian) "What color are your teeth?" I asked the officer what was meant by that question and he replied, "They are white". I was once asked to provide 12 different photos of myself (as always, on a red background) at a single office visit (the office visits in Jakarta alone typically took at least a week, but when they didn't we would have to request an extended stay in the city before immigrating to Palangkaraya, Pontianak, etc. At least this first field season I was on a type of visa where we didn't have to go through this complete process of obtaining permission from at least 5 different agencies in Jakarta before flying onto Kalimantan. I once stumbled upon a collage of photos of all researchers and visitors at a particular point – researchers on red background, researchers/visitors on a tourist visa on a regular passport background. Apparently the police offices throughout the province kept these photos in their offices, just in case…
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| getting fingerprinted (many times) as part of the permit process (this photo was taken at the immigration office in Pontianak (West Kalimantan) in 2008 |
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| I discovered this collage of several of us (long-term researchers on red backgrounds, those staying briefly on regular European passport backgrounds) handing in the MAWAS office; apparently it was distributed to police stations throughout the province, "just in case" |
Finally we were able to fly not directly to Palangkaraya, but to Palangkaraya via Banjarmasin, the provincial capital of South Kalimantan. It was during this car ride that I first heard the full story of the tragic events that happened at Carel’s Sumatran orangutan field site shortly before I started my graduate studies. We took a day while in Palangkaraya to visit colleagues at Nyaru Menteng, an orangutan rehab facility (the one where Animal Planet’s “Orangutan Island” was filmed). It is amazing and distressing to see so many orphaned infant orangutans every time I visit a rehab center, the vast majority of whom have lost their mothers at the hands of humans…
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orangutan orphans at Nyaru Menteng eating durian fruit |
The Tuanan project mess (no. 7, Jl. Cenderawasih) is quite nice and off the beaten path. We could take the B buses from the mess into town, where the most interesting thing to do in Palangkaraya was have dinner at the karaoke restaurant Café Boy or hang out eating grilled corn at the Bundarun (roundabout) -- this was the case both before and after the big opening of the PALMA mall near the BNI bank, where I once went with some friends from the Sabangau research site in an attempt to see a movie at the new theater in the mall, but we opted not to watch a movie called “Toilet 105”). I did, however, have a very entertaining time once while in town (I typically made the journey from the forest to Palangkaraya once every 1-3 months, less often in the first few years) on Indonesian Independence Day, playing an arcade game with Susan from Sabangau, in which the goal was to shoot at a giant mosquito (“nyamuk” in Indonesian) before it filled with blood and gave you malaria.
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| floating across a road on canoes in the rainy season |
Back in 2003 and until only a few years ago, the method of getting to the Tuanan field site (a long drive from Palangkaraya to Kuala Kapuas, follwed by a public speed boat to Mantangai, where we arranged to be picked up by the Tuanan kelotok—basically a motorized canoe) involved a very long boat ride and floating a car (often filled with many people—my record was 14 people in a single car) on two canoes pushed by people across the flooded street in the rainy season. Since then the public speed boats have stopped operating and the bridge over the area that always flood was finally completed, but the longer road trip often requires hours of pushing the car through mud when it gets stuck.
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| Tuanan Field Station (photo taken in 2005) |
My general first impression of Tuanan back in the summer of 2003 was that the area is generally unproductive, especially compared to the primary forest I was used to in Thailand (and compared to the Gunung Palung forest where I later spent two years during my post-doc). Canals (“tatas”) have been made in the forest for the purpose of carrying logs out, which drains the swamp out into the Kapuas River. There is a also an old railroad made of logs on Transect L that can be seen clearly in satellite images of the field site.
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| Odom with fruit samples during a week-long survey at Sungai Tunggul, where I first tried to set up a site before politics got in the way |
I followed my first wild orangutans (and adult female named Jinak and her son Jerry) almost immediately – Jinak and Jerry and a female named Juni (who is likely Jinak’s older offspring) were the first orangutans discovered at Tuanan, just days before our arrival. During my first few focal follows I saw Jinak build a nest incorporating a fixed roof and leaf blanket. And I heard my first nest smack, a vocalization given by orangutans at Tuanan (but not,
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| making a plan while searching for orangutans at Tuanan |
interestingly, at most other wild orangutan sites, including my site at Sungai Lading) at the very last stages of nest building just before laying down (“golek”) on the night nest. It is as if they are saying to us “selamat malam” (= good night). Jerry cries a lot, which Carel reminded me is consistent with the expectation according to Trivers’ parental investment hypothesis (fragile sons) that males cry more often than females. Most of my initial follows were with some combination of Indonesian assistants (at this time I didn’t yet speak Indonesian and the assistants didn’t speak any English, so I literally started learning the language word by word using a dictionary and hand gestures), Odom (an Indonesian friend of mine who worked for BOS MAWAS and later helped me conduct my big nest count to determine orangutan density at Sungai Lading; Carel has referred to Odom as the world’s best orangutan nest counter and he is also Birute Galdikas’s nephew), Carel, Maria, Serge, Tine, and Perry.
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| Sumi and her daughter Susi at the edge of the Tuanan forest (photo credits: Tine Geurts, Tuanan Orangutan Project) |
We all took turns searching for and following various orangutans. Carel was amazed at how quickly orangutans at Tuanan (compared to Suaq and other sites) make their nests at Tuanan (most extreme in the dry season). Yet even at Tuanan we regularly see orangutans adding roofs and leaf blankets, mattresses, and most often pillows to their night nests. Interesting since at Sungai Lading they most often made leafy mattresses—blankets and pillows were made much less often. This first field season was very exciting, since we found so many animals for the first time. Whoever first discovers an orangutan gets to name it, as long as the name isn’t also the name of a living person who might someday visit the site (to avoid data referring to orangutan activities that might get confusing or embarrassing if referencing a familiar person’s name). This first field season I found in a team with Serge, Tine, and our field assistants Nadi and Linandi, Sumi and her daughter Susi (in 2006 Sumi was killed by a clouded leopard and after we took Susi to the Nyaru Menteng rehab center where she thrived for several months, she eventually died of a Strongyloides parasite – she was an amazing animal, one of my favorite) and a big male named Rambo.
The first orangutans I found by myself and named were Niko (the first male found at Tuanan, who ended up being the most dominant male – I named him after my orange tabby Niko and our field assistant Nadi later named his 8th child after the orangutan Niko), Kerry (I like the name Carrie, but we couldn’t spell Kerry with a C because Cerry, or Carrie as I would have spelled it, would be pronounced in Indonesian the same as “Jerry”, and we already had a Jerry), and her daughter Kondor (who I named after one of my favorite Robert Redford movies, “Three Days of the Condor”, though we spelled it with a K because the daughter of Kerry had to start with the same letter of the alphabet).
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| Niko (Tuanan Orangutan Project) |
I was bird watching alone on a day off the day I found Niko, Kerry, and Kondor. In my journal from that day I wrote: “To the forest alone again today at 04:45, determined to find the source of the long calls to the North. First gibbon heard calling faintly @ 04:41…I finally saw one of those mini grey squirrels with a mustache…Then suddenly, while sitting on my log looking at the squirrels and geckos, at 07:07 I counted a 6-pulse long call…” To summarize, I followed the long call, saw some tree sways in the distance, and eventually found and adult female (Kerry), her very large but still dependent offspring (Kondor) and a big male (Niko). It is interesting that at Tuanan there are so many flanged males (they have developed cheekpads). It appears that unlike in Sumatra and in some other sites in Borneo, Tuanan males cannot afford to be reproductively suppressed…
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| on a swampy transect at Tuanan |
The big male Niko threw several branches and a dead tree in my direction and came down within about a meter of me while displaying in the trees. While he was doing this, Kerry and Kondor disappeared and then Niko came down to the ground and ran quickly away from me…interesting since orangutans in Sumatra rarely come to the ground (presumably because of the greater number of ground predators there). I learned my lesson this day to never again leave camp without my machete, since getting through some of the vegetation without one while trying not to lose Niko was challenging (and painful) to say the least. I lost him for a bit but then found him again by following his long call. He greeted me with a big snag crash (threw a dead tree down in my direction). Eventually Niko went much farther north than the boundaries of the site to the north (at least farther than the site perimeter at the time), but we found him in the area the next morning.
Carel held his first short course with our counterpart Indonesian professors and their students at Tuanan in 2003, several of which I have worked with in more recent years. During the course the students learned about triangulation methods for estimating gibbon densities and about various methods of conducting nest count surveys to estimate orangutan densities.
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| Tuanan short course, 2003 |
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