10 March, 2019
The body of a month-old orangutan lies on a rescue team’s surgical drape, near the town of Subulussalam, Sumatra, Indonesia. She died soon after being found with her injured mother on a palm oil plantation.
Orangutans live on just two islands in the world, Sumatra and Borneo, and are being forced out of their natural rainforest habitat as palm oil plantations, logging and mining proliferate. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are only around 14,000 Sumatran orangutans left. As female orangutans dedicate eight to nine years raising each child before having another, populations are easily at risk of decline. The baby orangutan’s mother, named Hope by rescue workers, was found totally blind, with a broken clavicle and 74 air-gun wounds. She had been shot at by villagers after eating fruit from their orchards.
Alain Schroeder
Alain Schroeder is a Belgian photojournalist born in 1955. In 1989 he founded Reporters, a photo agency in Belgium. Schroeder’s work has been published in National...
