Chapter 26
The tropical rain forest is the most complex thing an ordinary human can experience on this planet. A walk in the rain forest is a walk into the mind of God.
Birute M.F. Galdikas
Field Work
Within several weeks, life at Fossey fell into definite patterns and routines. Mark and several other PhD researchers spent much of their time in the jungle conducting research through systematic observation of Orangutans. Others at the camps, although interested in orangutans, focused primarily on broader issues in the rainforest's ecology, so their research took a more holistic approach. Others focused on proboscis monkeys or macaques. The researchers all had one thing in common. They were all young, fresh, naive and were about to rock the academic world with their findings.
Celine, as Mark later discovered and suspected, was not an anthropology student; Gunther had hired her as a special favour to a colleague from McGill, whom he had worked with back in Canada. Celine was clearly not an academic. She seemed ill at ease being thrust among a group of dedicated students when she had other interests. This mix seemed to bring out the worst in her competitive nature. However, her relocation to remote Borneo seemed like a solid solution to some sensitive and embarrassing family situations back home, allowing her to disappear from the scene of her crimes for a short while, and so she was taken on as a general volunteer and assigned duties within the camp.
Her main priorities were in the rehabilitation clinic and the quarantine area. This was a crucial focus of activity, as it was where incoming orangutans and other primates first came into contact with the camp for medical treatment and observation. While in quarantine, staff observed animals for disease and treated them accordingly. There was always great concern that disease from the jungle would spread amongst the orangutans being rehabilitated for release back into the jungle. The reverse was also true: captive orangutans could just as easily contract human-borne diseases and transmit them to the jungle. Celine had some training as a nurse’s aide, which she thought might come in handy in assisting the vets with primate care. It was worth a try. Her duties also included caring for and feeding infant and young orangutans, as well as the not-so-enviable task of cleaning cages, which was especially unpleasant after an occupant had suffered a bout of diarrhea.
There was a wide range of interests, and after orientation day, everyone was kept quite busy. In a sense, everyone volunteered, as no one was paid for their efforts. Many of the sponsoring universities paid the OIT directly for the opportunity and privilege of allowing their students to research at a world-class facility such as Camp Fossey, with the prestigious Dr. Gunther presiding. He was the glue that kept all the pieces together.
This kind of research was a win-win for the OIT, the sponsoring universities, the research candidates, the primates under study, Indonesia, and the environment in general. When Gunther started his research in 1971, the camp consisted of a few palm-thatched huts, one research assistant, and several local Dayak natives who doubled as park rangers. His budget was negligible, and he endured a level of deprivation that would have sent most researchers quickly packing for civilization. It is a credit to his determination and perhaps his love of orangutans that he survived those initial years.
As the research grew, it also caught the attention and imagination of the world. Dr. G, like his friends Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, was pictured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine with two of his adopted Orangutans. The publicity had multiple effects. After seeing a picture of an adorable orangutan orphan, most people could not ignore the orangutan's plight as it moved from endangered to the brink of extinction. These caring people donated money to the cause. The negative effect of the orangutan publicity was a greater demand in the underground black market for illegal orangutans as pets in the global market. The yin and yang of media exposure to a noble cause.
As Dr. Gunther eloquently pointed out at one of his ten-minute breakfast meetings, “Just because something, an animal or a plant species, is endangered doesn’t mean it is protected. The success of ecological movements or programs depends on people like you who study and volunteer their time. Success in terms of what we are trying to achieve here at Fossey derives from society’s collective guilt and helplessness. Not everyone can be an anthropologist going into the wilds of the jungle like some of you, but in our other lives we can choose not to buy a dining room table made from rainforest hardwoods, or consume products made from oil palm...”
Mark definitely agreed with his coworkers that breakfasts with Dr. G were indoctrinating and motivating. For Mark, his stay at Fossey was intoxicating; from his ‘Garden of Eden’, Dr. G was creating a movement with a wide following. Mark was pleased to be a small part of something bigger than himself. Being at Fossey filled an indefinable need. He was content.
During the second week of camp, Mark was teamed up with an American grad student, Dallas, from UCLA. They quickly developed a rapport and made a good team. Together they drove out in one of the camp’s veteran jeeps, a possible legacy of the last world war when the Japanese occupied this island. They travelled on a rutted, sandy track that served as a road. It took them about an hour to the NE, where they left their vehicle, and the road disappeared into a dense green mass. There, they unloaded their packs and equipment and walked another arduous hour into the jungle, battling carnivorous insects.
They soon sweated from the exertion of walking over the rough, wet terrain, using their machetes, or parangs as the locals called them, to clear a path through dense foliage growing on parts of the forest floor. They wore long sleeves to protect their arms from the aggressive growth. Their shirts were soaked with sweat because of the high humidity; nothing evaporated. A slight mist lifted from the jungle floor. Insect and bird sounds added a discordant note, as if an alien symphony orchestra were tuning before a performance.
From where the jeep was parked in relative sunlight, the forest proper felt like going from midday brightness to dusk. Very little light got through the top layers of the canopy about 160 feet above their heads. Trees grew tall, straight, and branchless until they finally spread out to form a thick, dense canopy. New growth rose another 20 to 30 feet above the canopy. Mark and Dallas hoped to make their sightings in the canopy layer. This is where most forest fruit grew and, therefore, where orangutans and other forest creatures would be found. It was no easy task studying primates whose food and safety preferences kept them 100 feet above the ground and whose long limbs and Olympic-class agility allowed them to move swiftly through the canopy.
Orangutans, on the island of Borneo, are semi-solitary animals, even more so than their compatriots on Sumatra. Therefore, people did not see orangutans on every outing. Early efforts to study these marvellous apes systematically over the long term failed because of their elusiveness. On this day, Mark and Dallas were fortunate to see two females foraging for fruit with their young about 200 feet from their position and eighty feet above the forest floor. Mark scanned below the forest canopy with his compact 8x binoculars, trying to spot the distinctive orange/rust-coloured hair of the Orang. “Dallas, Mark whispered, you remember your history, right? Remember when the Canadian and British forces whipped your American asses in the War of 1812? You do know we burnt down the White House and other fun stuff.” Mark had a perverse joy in teasing his American partner. From Mark’s experience at Fossey and the University of Toronto, American students often came with a superiority complex that needed recalibration.
Dallas had to smile because he knew Mark was going somewhere with this bizarre thread of a thought. “Yeah, make your point, Mark, you always have one.”
“Sorry, I was just thinking about the scarlet red uniforms worn by the British soldiers during the war and how that made such a good target for the Americans and yet you guys still lost the war. Why was that, Dallas? I thought Americans liked to say they have never lost a war? Mark pointed almost straight up, “Look at that guy right up there, for example.”
Mark pointed up to the right and handed Dallas his binoculars. Dallas grabbed them with a measure of irritation, aiming and focusing with military precision, immediately spotting the orangutan.
“Doesn’t he look like a British soldier in bright uniform, easy to spot, right? They don’t have to really camouflage because there are no real predators up there, no danger to hide from. To finish my comparison, the redcoats had no natural predators either. Get what I’m saying, Dallas?
Dallas just shook his head. “I thought you were some kind of passive Mennonite type. What do you know about war? You’re the last one to talk, but thanks for the history lesson.
“Look, there,” Dallas pointed, “Here’s one in light reflection.”
“The orangutan that you pointed out,” explained Mark, “shows up so well to us on the ground just now because he’s standing like Springsteen in the spotlight. He’s in the upper canopy in the sunlight. Light reflects from his hair. We can clearly see the bright orange. The moment that great ape steps back into the shade, like, going, going, gone, right now the reflective properties of the hair disappear, and all we see is his dark skin.
“In other words, he becomes a shadow. Something like a militia minuteman in the Revolutionary War. They pretty well moved through the British lines at will, Dallas commented.
“Anyway, good eye, Mark, if we could get back to business here. There’s another one at about thirty yards to the left, also with her young. The infants look about two, maybe three years old. Obviously, these two females were drawn by the availability of fruit in this location and likely live in overlapping ranges, so let’s watch for any sign of interaction between the two adult females.”
“Yeah, sounds like a plan, agreed, Mark. Let’s just hang tight and get a few pictures, jot a few notes and see what’s what.”
They tried to arrange their gear so they could sit on their backpacks and lean against the buttress root of a large Tualang tree. The rainforest soil is neither deep nor fertile. The buttress is nature’s ingenious solution for supporting an 80-ft tree in shallow, sandy soil. When trees are cut down, as is the current trend, the nutrients in the soil leach downward, where no roots can reach them. Secondary growth tends to be short grass and ferns, which support more snakes than trees.
During several of their jungle orientation classes at Fossey, before they were even allowed to set a single foot outside the camp’s perimeter, they were warned about a million dangers, from leeches to fire ants, and about not sitting on fallen logs because of the snakes and toxic saps they contained. Even male orangutans, with eight times the strength of a puny human, could be dangerous if provoked in unpredictable ways.
The orangutan pair continued to incessantly feed. The adults kept a constant distance between themselves; the infants clung to their mothers, making only short trips to play and explore, then returned with a tight grip to their mothers. The mothers were not aggressive to each other, nor did they show any need to interact. They were as indifferent to each other as pedestrians on a busy city street. They seemed content in their own space and indifferent to the two pale-looking primates peering up from below.
Mark scribbled some notes in his field book about the orangutan’s location and sighting, and drew a few sketches. The previous evening, he sketched an ethogram with headings such as locomotion, feeding, foraging, resting, vocalization, nest-building, and so on, and, with careful observation, filled in notes in each quadrant. Over many months, he would have most of the data ready for statistical analysis for his thesis. Next, he mounted his 250 mm lens onto his Pentax camera base to capture close-up shots of the mothers and their infants feeding on succulent Durian fruit.
Mark jotted in rough script, “It is hard to get a bad picture of an orangutan. Solitary foraging, at a relaxed pace, is completely characteristic of orangutan behaviour. They are naturally photogenic, infinitely playful, and constantly kinetic. Eats fruit of which there is ample supply in the canopy level (frugivore), young leaves, flowers, bark, strips off with his fingers in long strips, insects, of which there is a god-awful abundance, favours ants, termites, pupae and crickets, constantly foraging, constantly eating, seems to love Durian fruit; has a spiny green exterior, emits a rotting stench for a dual level of protection, doesn’t seem to work well on Orangs, oblong in shape about a foot in length.
Dallas interrupted the flow of his writing. “Christ, what is that God-awful smell? Smells like pig shit wrapped in a gym sock.”
“That’s the durian fruit those two pretty ladies are serving up for their young. Don’t gag on me now, Dallas, but we ate some durian for dessert last night. The camp cook, Yusuran, put some in the cake we had. You seemed to like it then.”
Mark went back to his notes. Durian has vivid red flesh, a distinctive smell like pig shit, and an exterior that looks like a sea urchin.
Mark watched as one of the female orangutans, with powerful crushing force, bit into the durian, breaking the pods apart like a pomegranate. Orangutans feed on leaves and fruit; they love mangoes, so do I. 400 plant varieties to choose from; leaves and nuts are also important to the diet.
The forest took up the conversation when Mark and Dallas fell silent. There was stillness but no silence in the jungle; instead, a rhythmic surging cacophony of abundant life, a crepuscular performance, the dashing of a pair of barking deer, a wild boar grunting and rummaging through forest trails against a background whine of cicadas as loud as revving jet engines, an infinite host of other unnamed insects in disharmony, a constant hum of mosquitoes; in the shade of the canopy close to water and swamp they swarm in volumes. Mark itched and oozed from bites and scratches in places he never thought possible. Songbirds vocalized their varied crescendos, reverberating from indiscernible points of origin, and the crunch of nuts crushed by the orangutan’s powerful jaws and teeth filled the air during their perpetual feasting. The jungle was an audible performance.
“Hey, Dallas, sorry about that reference a little while ago to the burning of the White House. As I was sitting here, I just realized the date. As I made today’s entry in my notes, I noticed it’s the anniversary marking the day since you guys left Saigon, rather unceremoniously, and so I didn’t mean to add insult to injury.”
“Okay, good one, Mark; first I filtered out the White House crap as a bad joke, which it was.”
“Agreed.”
“And I certainly wasn’t thinking about Vietnam, but thanks tons for reminding me. So, can we get back to what we came here to do?”
“Dallas, do you know what Civit is? An Asian Palm Civit?”
“Yeah, actually, I do.” Confused at the sudden change of topic, but also relieved. It's some sort of cat, right? If you took a ferret and a lemur and crossed it with a house cat and painted it like a raccoon, you would have something that looks like a civet.”
“You got it. Good description too.”
“Have you ever had Kopi Luwak or cat poop coffee? I had some at a cafe in Jakarta before we came over here. It was about $4, that’s American dollars, for a cup. Talk about a rip-off. The civet eats the coffee beans and shits them out. Then, some lucky farmer comes along and digs through the shit. He collects, dries, and sells the beans for a fortune. He probably doesn’t make a fortune, but someone does. Those beans make the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world.”
Although Dallas was pleased to be teamed up with his strange, talkative pacifist Mennonite-Canadian and new friend, he often got bored and annoyed by Mark’s quirky humour, odd bits of trivia, and preachy tendencies, but urged him on to get it over with and get back to work. “And the point you are about to make is?”
“Well, it's this: did you see how the orangutan ate those seeds from the durian? Some seeds from different plants will only germinate on the forest floor once they pass through the orangutan's gut. The orangutan is much like our mutant poop cat, the civet. Some of what grows around us here does just that because, by ingesting seeds, orangutans alter their chemistry and structure, allowing them to germinate. Therefore, Orangutans help create the forest, while we human primates cut it down faster than it can grow back. In fact, that’s what my thesis touches on: “The Ecological Impact of the Orangutan on the Evergreen Dipterocarp Forest.”
“Sounds like a best seller, Mark, but I may just wait until the movie version comes out first.”
No, hang on, just listen: not only does the Orangutan help germinate seeds, but they also disperse seeds, and when they live in normal densities, they allow for the successful germination of at least 50 other species of fruiting trees, 15 species of liana, and thereby creates habitat for at least 5 other primates. And Dallas, if you just step back and look at the big picture, here in Borneo, the lumber companies come in, or the poachers, or both, and kill the orangutan mothers, snatch the infants; so some kid in Taiwan who just watched an American cartoon with an orangutan in it can have one as his very own pet. One way or another, trees get cut down, palm plantations get planted, and in the end, the habitat gets destroyed. It has a multiplier effect all the way down the food chain because we aren’t just talking orangutan; we are talking about hundreds and thousands of interrelated species in a biodiversity scheme that we are only just beginning to understand.”
“Mark, you’ve been in the jungle way too long. You sound a little too much like Dr. G. I’m starting to worry about you, my friend.”
“Holy Shit! What the hell was that?” Mark nearly dropped his camera as he tried to swipe at whatever was viciously attacking his neck. His mind immediately flew to tarantulas and praying mantises. Mark hated insects of every size and description.
“Don’t move, Mark. Let me see if I can get the little bastard before he gets to the jugular and you bleed out. Stop moving, you little girl, and let me get at it. Shit, not so little after all; make that a big bastard. He’s got a good grip, too; it must be a vampire beetle. I’m afraid he’s coming off with a little chunk of you. I’ll count to three, then I’ll yank the little cretin.”
On one, catching Mark off guard, Dallas squeezed the grey-green body of the spiny beetle and pulled with firm, steady pressure until only the jaws were left deeply embedded in Mark’s neck. The insect’s body still wiggled; apparently, it had not received the neurotransmission from the severed head that it was dead, so it kept up the good fight.
“Look at the size of this bugger, will you?”
Mark saw a long green-grey body with horny spikes and recognized the Three-horned Rhinoceros Beetle, which looked prehistoric because it had probably evolved in the shade of the dark, humid rainforest floor long before human primates could walk. He nearly fainted. Dallas caught him on his way down. “Hold on there, buddy.”
The orangutans weren’t pleased with the noisy disturbance from the scrawny little primates below them, and they showed their displeasure by hurling the spiky husks of the smelly durian pod downward with surprising accuracy and velocity.
“Why don’t we gather our stuff and call it a day? I think we got some of what we wanted today,” Dallas said as they dodged another durian pod from an irate orangutan.
