PALANGKARAYA, INDONESIA – The orangutan clings to the top of a mostly leafless tree in Indonesia’s Borneo, as waves of thick smoke from the forest fires burning below waft over her. Nicknamed Novita, the ape shown in footage released by a conservation group is among dozens that have been rescued from wildfires burning across parts of Sumatra and Borneo in recent months. They include Bara, a male orangutan plucked from the haze on Thursday, authorities said.
The haze was quite thick in the area because fires were burning around there,” Handi Nasoka, a local natural resources conservation agency official, said on Friday. Wildfires have piled pressure on already endangered orangutans, forcing local groups and authorities to carry out high-stakes rescues of animals suffering smoke inhalation and burns. Novita, a female estimated to be 3 to 4byears old, remains at the Nyaru Menteng rehabilitation center in Indonesia’s Palangkaraya after being rescued last month.
Novita was rescued by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, which has taken in several apes caught up in forest fires. She was found clinging to a tree in late September and tranquilized by a rescue team, who administered oxygen and intravenous fluids before moving her to the rehabilitation center. Before we reached her, she had to walk through the fire to get to the tree and climb it, so the soles of her feet and her toes were burned,” said foundation CEO Jamartin Sihite.
Indonesia regularly battles wildfires during the dry season, which in Borneo typically peaks between July and September. The fires have intensified this year in part because of the El Nino weather phenomenon, set to be one of the strongest since comparable records began four decades ago. El Nino typically brings severe drought to Indonesia, but experts note that slash-and-burn practices and drying of peatlands have made previously resistant landscapes increasingly fire-prone.
Between January and July alone, more than 202,000 hectares were razed by fire, according to government figures that have not been updated since. The Nusantara Atlas project, which uses satellite monitoring, estimated nearly 896,000 hectares — over five times the size of Greater London — had burned by the end of August. The fires have created severe haze locally, with tens of thousands of cases of respiratory illnesses, and also caused regional air pollution spikes in Singapore and Malaysia.
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