A Rare Look at the Secret Life of Orangutans | Short Film Showcase
Something like seven million years ago, there was nothing like a human on Earth. There was not even a pre-human standing upright; there were simply great apes, very much like the ones that live with us today.
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I was crossing the river at dawn. It was just getting light, and I was jumping from stone to stone to try not to get my boots wet as I crossed this broad stream. In the middle, I paused. Then I looked down the stream just to kind of, you know, woke up and down the stream just to check out the view. When I looked downstream, just about 20 meters away from me, maybe 30 meters away from me at the most, there was a big male orangutan, and he hadn't seen me because he was doing the same thing as me. He was going the other direction, trying to cross the river without getting his feet wet. I just was so struck by the fact that what he was doing was so similar to what I was just doing, and I just felt like, you know, to a sort of passing the morning dawn there.
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We usually have to get up really early, so maybe 3:30 in the morning wake up and then get ready. We really need to be at the run upon Ness by 5:00 a.m. when they wake up. So that means you're ready and then hiking could be up to an hour in the rainforest in the dark, using our headlamp to the nest. One of the things that makes a heart is actually finding them. They're primarily solitary, and so it actually takes a long time to find them. They can go outside of our study area. It may take us like a week of search days, days of their person, days to actually find their aunt on. It's not realistic to just, what, hunter force myself and go find a neurotic on the photograph; it's not gonna happen. So I'm always teaming up with a research team that are already trusting followed in Toronto.
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In the whole world, orangutans only live in one area: two big islands of Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia. Within those islands, of course, they only live in the remaining good areas of rainforest. One of those is a national park called zoom polymers, where I've been working for twenty years with my wife, Sheryl, and that's where she has a long-term runtime project. Our site is deep in the interior of that National Park, and it comprises the eight different habitats.
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Tamo national in American Prostitute, Ama national, Tolan, Capti, Indonesia, Canisius, Karen, Tama national, Goon, Voluma, della Paura, Hindu suppose away, an eternity Diprivan, kawasan inwardly a certificate, are ya guru. Paul National Park is this huge area, over a hundred thousand hectares in size. The challenge county research station, which is where we've carried out most of the proton research, academic pound is only two thousand hectares. These are orangutans, the wrong times we study at Chellah Ponte. They don't necessarily stay within those two thousand hectares all the time. So my goal was to stay with these wrong tones for five days, sometimes up to ten days in a row over the course of an entire year. By staying with them for these long periods, I was also able to document really unique behaviors that haven't been captured before.
So before I studied biology and anthropology in college, I really had no idea that other species had culture besides humans. When I saw these cultural traditions in orangutans for the first time, it was sort of a really big sight to behold. It was my first day, and I was out early in the morning to go to Cho's nest. When I got there, I had never seen an orangutan in the wild, not even in the zoo. I was under this tree waiting for him to wake up, sometime around 5:30 in the morning. The first thing he did was he let out this really loud, long call right above me.
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It was a very powerful experience. It was not a sound that I had ever heard anything like. To meet culture is such a human element, and to see it in other species is really fascinating. Culture means so much to humans, so almost everything we do is cultural, both with feeding traditions and with social traditions. You see things that are inherited from mother to child or sometimes adopted from friend to friend that show that behavior has got this wonderful flexibility, adaptability that is so much of a characteristic of humans and seen in the great apes.
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So orangutans do this vocalization called kiss squeaking. It's done by pursing their lips and making a kissing sound, like a roll. Much louder than the vocalization, this week is not a threat sound that they make when they actually meet an unfamiliar orangutan. They also do it to people sometimes, including pollen. They do this using leaves; they grab some leaves, they bring it up to their mouth, they do this kiss squeak, and then they throw the leaves out. At other field sites, they may not use the leaves at all. This is an example of a local custom that's found in that area, similar to the way people greet each other differently in different countries. Maybe in some places, you know, people shake hands; in another place, they bow. So orangutans are also showing these interesting cultural variations between sites.
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I've always been fascinated to understand, you know, why we're human. What makes us human? You know, we had so many kinds of humans in the past and different kinds of bipedal apes. You know, Australopithecines, and we had some that went extinct and some that didn't and then evolved into humans. So, you know, why is that? You know, why did some population of Australopithecines eventually evolve into the Homo genus? I think that the human species is incredibly fortunate to have orangutans and the other great apes—gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees—as representatives of what we came from. We still share a varying large percentage of our DNA, with maybe around 97% orangutans surviving one window into understanding human evolution.
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There are different ways that orangutans make umbrellas. One way is they just break off an entire branch and sort of modify this branch to make an umbrella. Other times, they pull the entire branch towards them and make a little roof over their head. Some orangutans, when they're making a nest and it's still raining really hard, would actually make a big roof over their nests. They can put together a bunch of branches and leaves and sort of weave hovering, and that's a really effective way for them to stay dry while they're sleeping.
All the great apes make this, and they're the only primate that makes nests. That's important because they have large bodies, and it's a way that they can sleep in the trees where they're safer from ground predators. There seems to be variation in kind of some subtleties of nest building. We heard some researchers from another site describing that they made a pillow to go in the nest, and we thought, “Oh, you know, we've never seen that, right?” But we’d never thought about it. We just thought of making a nest, building a platform, and lying down, and we never watched that closely. Well, once we heard these researchers from other sites say that if they saw orangutans making a pillow, we started watching more carefully. And then, sure enough, we noticed that orangutans, Goot and Pollen, were also sometimes making a pillow, putting it down just as they plop down on top of it.
As researchers, you know, learn more and more about orangutans and know what questions to ask, know what to look for, you know, we're learning more interesting things. It is so precious to be able to understand our connection to the natural world, to have these other species to give us lessons and remind us where we come from. It makes us, in some ways, humble; it also makes us fascinated.
Yet we risk losing them all.
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It's gonna be a race against time to be able to document what are the cultural variations before they just disappear forever. Every lock on life is really important; they only have an average of the baby about once every seven or eight years. The longest of birth spacing of any mammal. So with their slow rate of reproduction, a lot of dogs simply can't sustain any kind of reduction in their population like that over the long term. This century, we could lose all of the orangutans if it carries on at the rate of devastation in Borneo and Sumatra that's been seen in the recent decades. We stand so much to gain, and we stand so much to lose.
Yes, you can't protect what you don't know. We can't all go to Borneo or Sumatra, or we can't all go to the rainforest there. But we can bring the rainforest to people through media coverage.
All right, first shot! All that practice yesterday, you don't.
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Oh, murders, every population is different, and the more we study them, the more different we realize they are.
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When you see an orangutan looking back at you, you can, you know, sense that there is something there in those eyes. You know they're thinking. It's hard to imagine that we could just sort of what's that goat's name?
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