Help to Monitor and Protect Orangutans in Borneo

We are extremely excited to report back with our updates! 

In early July, the BOS Foundation camera trap team headed back to the Bukit Batikap Protection Forest to install the 30 new Reconyx cameras, which after a long journey from the USA had arrived safely at Nyaru Menteng. 

From our starting point at the BOS Foundation Orangutan Rehabilitation Center at Nyaru Menteng in Central Kalimantan, it takes three days to reach Batikap using a combination of car, boat, back to a car and another boat and so on. Batikap is quite literally in the center of Borneo and logistically challenging to reach. This makes it perfect for a newly reintroduced orangutan population, but a little less perfect for us to reach! Although it was the dry season, it was incredibly rainy and despite the delays we faced with rivers being too high for the vehicles to cross at various points, we finally made it back to camp at the end of day three with our precious cargo intact. The BOS Foundation Post Release Monitoring (PRM) team were there to welcome us with hot food and coffee and it was wonderful to be back in camp after such a long time due to the global COVID travel restrictions.

We wasted no time in getting straight into fieldwork and over the next week, come rain or shine, we spent every day in the field carefully selecting new camera locations, focusing on “high traffic” orangutan areas such as river crossing points, nesting and feeding trees and overall areas where we believe we can maximise capturing orangutan images. Only time will tell if this is the case, however our study design is flexible and we have the option of moving cameras to different parts of the forest over the coming months. 

Batikap is a truly stunning forest with a wealth of wildlife. Despite our packed schedule deploying cameras, every day we saw wild primates including red langurs, white fronted langurs, macaques and gibbons. Each morning the gibbons would wake us at 4.30-5 am with their songs as they called out to other nearby pairs. It doesn’t get much better than that and they made a fantastic alarm clock! Wildlife is everywhere and we were also greeted one day by a black cobra who slithered past us quickly whilst we were tying up the boat…It was an amazing field visit and we can’t wait to see the early results and share those with you. 

Once again, the BOS Foundation camera trap team in Batikap thanks everyone for such incredible generosity and for helping us to monitor the orangutans and other wildlife species in Batikap - we honestly couldn’t do this without you!