For National Geographic
11 April, 2019
A veterinarian carries Diana, an eight-year-old female orangutan, for a final release into the wild in the Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve, Sumatra. Since 2011, more than 100 orangutans have been released back into their natural habitat at Jantho, and several new births have been recorded.
Indonesia’s orangutans are under severe threat from the ongoing depletion of the rainforest. Sumatran orangutans, which once ranged over the entire island of Sumatra, are now restricted to the north and critically endangered. They are almost exclusively arboreal: females virtually never travel on the ground and adult males do so rarely. As logging, mining, and palm oil cultivation increase, orangutans find themselves squeezed into smaller pockets of forest, forced out of their natural habitat and in more frequent conflict with humans. Organizations such as the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) care for lost, injured and captive orangutans, aiming to reintroduce them into the wild. Human caregivers take on the maternal role that female orangutans play, aiming to reintroduce young to their natural habitat at around the age of seven or eight, when they would naturally leave their mothers in the wild.
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...
