360° Orangutan School | National Geographic

In a remote corner of Borneo, hidden in a patch of protective jungle, there's a school for baby orangutans. Very often, we receive around, and they have spent their whole life in captivity, and that they have never been able to climb a tree. Rescued from the illegal pet trade, all of them have lost their mothers. It may sound impossible that they no longer know how to climb, but this is how some of the wrong things come to us. They have to learn the most basic things, which is climbing a tree.

You know, this is how this process of rehabilitation is so challenging, because you are dealing with the wrong with ten steps. They don't know anything about being an orangutan. They have to learn to be an orangutan, and some of them are even afraid of heights. The process of learning is happening every single day. I mean, you know, we call it "an orangutan school," and it might sound like a humanized thing to say, but actually, this is a real school. The orangutans are learning from each other. The keepers can only help the environment so that then they will learn faster, but they will not be able to teach them.

They are not really the teachers. What they can do to facilitate this learning process is make sure that they spend as much time as possible on the top of the trees. It is basically the learning process of the school; up there, everything else will come. After a long school day, it's time to go home, and this is their school bus.

Yeah, yeah, hold on! These orphans are still too young to spend the night alone in the forest. Hello! They don't know how to find food, how to build a nest, or even keep dry in a rainstorm. They still have countless things to learn before they're ready to go it alone, graduate, and one day be released back into the wild.

Okay, let's go! Whoa, no happy! Yeah, it's impossible not to laugh on a run with them. When you spend time with an orangutan, they are very intelligent. They have a lot of feelings, very similar to our feelings. It's impossible not to get attached to them. They will try to reach out to you, and they will try to touch you. They may even try to hug you.

It's normal that they need some kind of physical contact. Don't forget that this language - they are in the first years of their lives. They spend most of their time clinging on to their mothers. So, when they become too attached to humans, they want to get this comfort from us. You have to learn to let them go because you have to make sure that they are not going to be dependent on you.

That's why, you know, we try to encourage them to be together, and a lot of times they take each other in. They are hugging them all the time, you know, and they hug each other because this is comfort for them. They will have the chance to learn from each other until the point when we consider that they are ready to be released into the world. Then they are taken to the forest to be released.

Every time that you rescue orangutans, it is a bittersweet feeling because you feel good that you have given this orangutan maybe another chance. But at the same time, it is hard to think that every time that we have an orangutan here, it means that maybe one more orangutan has been killed, the mother has been killed, and many other orangutans that we are unable to rescue as well might have been killed.

What really breaks my heart is to see that we are failing to save the habitat of these orangutans. Along with this, they are refugees in their own ecosystem. In the last two decades, nearly 80% of their habitat has been burned to the ground. At the current rate of destruction, orangutans could be fully extinct in just 10 years.

There wouldn't be any point for me standing here if there was no hope. I think the reality is that there are many orangutans out there and that we are still in a moment of time we can do something about it. For these three-year-olds, today is a special day. They've outgrown the nursery, and this morning their school bus is going to take them someplace they've never been before.

This will be their first day in the real forest. These trees are taller than any they've ever seen, but here they'll learn to climb even higher and how to build a nest for the night. For these orphans, a new chapter in their lives begins on the road back to the wild. Oh, you!