The Race to Rescue Orangutans From Indonesia's Raging Fires

In late September, flames licked just 15 feet from the base of a slender sengon tree, its white bark beginning to darken from smoke and ash. Clinging to its thin branches was a young orangutan who had attempted to flee the forest fires that have ravaged Indonesia since July.

The crackling and roar of the flames was “the sound of disaster,” says Jamartin Sihite, a conservation ecologist with the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation who was there with a team of veterinarians, firefighters, and other volunteers trying to save the orangutan. The atmosphere seemed to be devoid of air, replaced with impenetrable, choking smoke—impossible to see through and impossible to breathe in. 

This season’s exceptionally strong El Niño event has worsened the fires, making a bleak outlook for Indonesia and its critically endangered orangutans. About 2 million acres have burned in Indonesia so far this year, with more than 1,700 human deaths attributed to the fires’ smoke. Active fires currently cover more than half of all orangutan habitat, including hotspots of biodiversity and orangutan strongholds such as Gunung Palung National Park in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo. The endangered apes are running out of places to go.

“We’ve had past fires, but nothing at this scale,” says Cheryl Knott, an anthropologist at Boston University who has studied orangutans since the early 1990s. High temperatures and prolonged drought dry out the thick mats of peat that lie at the floor of swampy rainforest. That peat becomes fuel which, once lit, is hard to extinguish. It can smolder underground, even after the fire at the surface is extinguished.

“If the fires continue, especially in the primary rainforest, it’s threatening the long-term prospects of the species for survival,” she warns. 

The day before, Sihite’s group and the Ministry of Forestry, which is involved in most rescues, received information from locals who had spotted an orangutan wandering, dazed. By the time an ambulance and firefighting team arrived on the scene, the orangutan had disappeared. They used a drone to scan the area and finally spotted the ape in the sengon tree. But the tree was surrounded by fire, and they couldn’t extinguish the flames before nightfall. 

“Imagine, you’re trapped in a tree, and surrounding you is fire and smoke,” Sihite says. “That’s scary and stressful.”

Eventually, they lost sight of the orangutan. The smoke was too dense.

So they waited, working overnight to keep the fire at bay. They sent the drone up again the following morning to spot the ape. It was alive, but the branches near it were too small to support the weight of any volunteers, so they had to sedate the ape from the ground with an anesthetic dart. After safely catching the orangutan in a net, the vets rushed in to assess its health.

The orangutan, who they named Novita, had burns covering about 20 percent of her body, including her hands and feet, which were scorched from running on the forest floor burning beneath her. She did not have acute respiratory distress, but many other orangutans caught in the fires have not been so lucky. Novita is being treated at a rehabilitation center, and her prognosis is good but not certain.

“We hope she will be saved,” Sihite says.

Novita is just one of the dozens of orangutans that have been rescued from the fires, which also threaten rare gibbons, elephants, and reptiles that can’t flee. But for every orangutan saved, there are some that perish. 

“The devastation is enormous. The toll of dead animals is huge,” says Karmele Llano Sánchez, a veterinarian with her conservation organization YIARI. “This is quite unprecedented, and the ecological damage will be felt for many years to come, when entire forests have burned, pushing some orangutan to the brink of extinction.”

Earth is home to three species of orangutan—Bornean, Sumatran, and Tapanuli—and they’re each critically endangered. They’re found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, and their populations have all declined precipitously in recent decades; roughly half of Bornean orangutans may have been lost from 1999 to 2018 alone.

A small part of that decline is due to illegal hunting and wildlife trafficking. But the biggest culprit is land use change, the loss of forests to agriculture, mining, and other human activities. From 1985 to 2001, Borneo lost more than half of its lowland forest to clearing. 

“Orangutan habitat is also the area that people love to use,” Sihite says. “We live face to face with the orangutan.”

Forest fires, the second-biggest threat to orangutans, are closely tied to land use because humans set fires to clear land for agriculture. El Niño exacerbates Indonesia’s fire season, bringing hot, dry weather and delaying the start of the rainy season. These events have been getting stronger in recent decades. Severe fires in 2015, during a super El Niño, served as a warning.

“We prepared everything to be ready if the fire comes to our area,” Sihite says. They collected firefighting equipment such as hoses, made breaks in vegetation to stop the fire’s spread, and stored water in a deep well. Across the island, other villages and research stations were doing similar work.

But even bracing for the worst, nothing could prepare them for the reality of a “Godzilla” El Niño fire season. The island has been in a drought for more than two months, and there’s little water to fight fires with.

“It’s a huge setback,” Knott says.

In West Kalimantan, nearly 500 miles from where Sihite works, orangutans fleeing the flames in desiccated peat forests end up on farms and in human settlements. There, Llano Sánchez and others have rescued dozens of orangutans. “We were not prepared for so many rescues,” she says. “It’s been really tough and exhausting.”

A particularly heart-wrenching rescue for Llano Sánchez and her collaborators was a mother orangutan and her baby, who were spotted clinging to a palm tree in an oil plantation after fleeing a forest fire. The collaborative rescue team, which included her organization and the Ministry of Forestry, made its way over rough terrain, bringing a net to catch the apes and a large metal cage to transport them. The fires were close, just 50 feet away and closing in, and the air was thick with smoke. Once the orangutans were safely sedated with anesthetic darts and caught, the veterinarians assessed them.

“They were in the worst condition,” says Erik Sulidra, a conservationist with the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program who observed the rescue. The mother, named Mama Penja, had severe burns on her feet, legs, and arms. Penja, the baby, was less burned, but both were severely dehydrated and emaciated.

Seeing the burned orangutans was devastating, but “the most depressing thing was to see her body skinny in bones, and her baby, too,” Llano Sánchez says. They quickly transported the rescues to a rehabilitation center where they’re still recovering.

Once an orangutan is rescued and treated, the danger isn’t over. With fires burning a huge portion of orangutan habitat, the rescuers can struggle to find a safe forest to relocate them in. Even where forest is intact, orangutans may face overcrowding and competition for limited food. If orangutans move into human-settled areas, more human-orangutan conflicts may arise. And fires can incinerate corridors of habitat that are critical for connecting patches of forest, leaving orangutan populations isolated and vulnerable.

“Habitat is running out,” Sihite says.

And with fire encroaching on research and rehabilitation stations, even rescuing and treating orangutans is becoming more difficult. Fire nearly claimed one of the research stations Knott helps run. That facility is safe for now, thanks to the efforts of volunteers there, but fire threatens others across the island. And nothing will be truly safe until the rains come and the fires are extinguished for good.

That may not happen for at least another month, although scattered showers have given workers a reprieve. Once the fires are at last extinguished, whether by firefighting or by rains, the vast work of forest recovery—clearing debris, planting trees, and relocating more orangutans—begins. 

“The whole place is entirely silent. All life is vanished or dead,” Llano Sánchez says. “It looks like a war zone.”

There’s a spot of good news. Since rescuing Mama Penja and Penja, Sulidra received a report from a ground patrol that several orangutans had made it out of the forest and were taking refuge near a river. It was a signal of the forest’s resilience.

That kind of sign helps keep the conservationists optimistic.

“We still have hope,” Sihite says. “Even if the fires become bigger and bigger, we keep our hope to protect and save the orangutan. That’s why we’re still working.”