If anyone can be considered an expert in her chosen field, it is Dr. Birut’ Galdikas. One of the world’s most renowned primatologists, she has dedicated the last 34 years of her life to the research and protection of orangutans in Indonesia. And in June, Galdikas visited students at The Odyssey School in Malibu to present a slide show and talk about her lifelong work with one of man’s closest relatives. Galdikas earned bachelor’s degrees in psychology and zoology and later her master’s degree in anthropology at UCLA. While still a graduate student, she attended a lecture by Dr. Louis Leakey, a Kenyan paleontologist, who, along with the National Geographic Society, assisted her in establishing a research lab to conduct field studies. Several years earlier, Leakey had provided similar opportunities to first Jane Goodall and then Dian Fossey, both of whom became famous for their work with great apes in Africa’Goodall with chimpanzees and Fossey with mountain gorillas. ‘Jane is a remarkable person,’ Galdikas said. ‘I’ve known her since before I went into the field. She really blazed the path for Dian and myself.’ Wild orangutans live only on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Galdikas established a camp on Borneo and today the Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine Facility she started in Central Kalimantan is still going strong. To date, it has returned over 300 orangutans to the wild. ‘I was only 25 when I arrived in Borneo in 1971 and feminism was a big issue,’ Galdikas recalled. ‘But I made up my mind that I was just going to focus on the orangutans and not deal with the feminist issues. I was able to play both sides of the street. And, fortunately, Indonesia is a very tolerant place.’ Galdikas began her work from a thatch-roofed hut in one of the world’s last wild places, Tanjung Puting Reserve. There were no telephones, no roads, there was no electricity, television or mail service. The land was being logged and laws protecting wildlife were not enforced. The rhinoceros had been hunted to extinction in the area and orangutans were commonly kept as pets, even by government officials. Before Galdikas began her research, very little was known about orangutans from a scientific standpoint. But through years of day-to-day observation, she gradually developed an understanding of the orangutans’ social behavior. For instance, it took 20 years of research to determine that females do not become sexually mature until the age of 15 and will typically reproduce only once every 8 to 10 years, the longest birth interval of any mammal. ‘Orangutan’ is Malay for ‘person of the forest.’ Their red hair and geographic location are not all that distinguish orangutans from the other great apes. For while gorillas and chimpanzees travel in groups, orangutans live the majority of their lives in isolation. One example Dr. Galdikas cited was an experiment she conducted in Borneo to determine the frequency of interaction among wild orangutans. ‘Males and females live separate lives,’ she told her attentive audience of fifth through eighth-graders. ‘After mating, a mother and her offspring probably won’t meet another orangutan for a long time. I once followed a mom for 31 days and she encountered only two subadult males.’ The largest arboreal animals in the world, orangutans spend 99 percent of their time in trees. Their diet consists primarily of fruit but they also eat leaves, flowers, bark and insects such as termites and larvae. In fact, seed dispersing activities are vital to maintaining the ecosystem in which they live. ‘They spread seeds through their feces and by spitting out the seeds of the fruits they eat, which will then germinate and maintain diversity in the rain forest,’ Galdikas said. ‘So concern for orangutans indicates concern for the planet.’ Though Indonesia and Malaysia have banned the export of orangutans and made it illegal to keep them as pets, animal dealers continue to smuggle babies off the islands and sell them to zoos or circuses. Tragically, for every baby orangutan that arrives at its destination in this way, five or six others die in the process of being captured or transported. So a population which once numbered in the millions and ranged as far north as China when Borneo and Sumatra were connected to the mainland of Southeast Asia, has been reduced to merely tens of thousands. An even bigger problem is that the tropical rain forests in which orangutans live are being destroyed by agriculture and mechanized logging. At the current rate, their entire habitat will be gone by 2081. ‘Unless tropical forests are saved, a third of the earth’s plant and animal life could vanish in our lifetime,’ Galdikas said. ‘Sadly, the orangutans have become refugees in their own land.’ Along with Dr. Gary Shapiro, the first person to successfully teach sign language to free-ranging, ex-captive orangutans, Dr. Galdikas established Orangutan Foundation International in 1986. OFI has five primary functions: stopping illegal logging, using sustainable economic alternatives for communities surrounding critical orangutan habitat, assuring sustained funding for long-term on-site research vital for effective conservation efforts, creating a national campaign to instill pride in orangutans and their environment, and releasing ex-captive orangutans into suitable, protected habitat. ‘I’m against zoos but I realize we are stuck with them,’ Galdikas said. ‘So I think they can serve a purpose as far as education goes. Actually, my love for orangutans started when I grew up watching them at the Toronto Zoo. Something about the curiosity in their eyes… I was drawn to them.’ In 1996, Galdikas published her autobiography, ‘Reflections of Eden,’ which she said she needed five years and ‘about 50 drafts’ to write. Another book, ‘Orangutan Odyssey,’ featuring the photographs of famous wildlife photographer Karl Ammann, was published three years later and became the genesis of her latest book, ‘Great Ape Odyssey,’ released in May. ‘We received such a positive response to the first one [‘Orangutan Odyssey’] and I knew Karl had lots of wonderful photos of all the great apes. I’m hoping we can produce a third volume that will include all of the primates in the near future.’ When she’s not in Indonesia, Galdikas teaches at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, checks in at OFI headquarters in Los Angeles (4201 Wilshire Boulevard), or visits her three children, one of whom, 20-year-old daughter, Jane, graduated from Palisades High and now attends Santa Monica College. But Birut’s true passion is saving the elusive primates that have provided a lifetime’s worth of fascination and wonder. As long as orangutans remain endangered, her job is far from done. ‘On the front lines of conservation there are no timeouts, no short cuts, and few final victories,’ she said. ‘The future of the orangutan lies with us.’ To make a donation to Orangutan Foundation International, visit the Web site: www.orangutan.org.
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