PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia—Endangered orangutans are falling victim to a devastating haze crisis that has left them sick, malnourished and severely traumatized as fires rage through Indonesia’s forests, reducing their habitat to a charred wasteland.
Rescuers at a center for the great apes on Borneo island are considering an unprecedented mass evacuation of the hundreds in their care, and have deployed teams on hazardous missions to search for stricken animals in the wild.
At the Nyaru Menteng cente in Kalimantan, sixteen baby orangutans have been put into isolation, suffering infections from prolonged exposure to the thick, yellow smoke suffocating Indonesia’s half of Borneo island.
A devoted carer tries to entertain the youngsters with toys and games as the infants recover from high fevers and serious coughs.
In another enclosure, several orangutans lie about listlessly, too exhausted to move after days hunting for food and water as fires relentlessly encroached on their forest homelands, forcing them to flee.
Others swing repeatedly from bar to bar, occasionally pausing to make a distinct smacking with their lips a sound that makes their carers anxious.
“That’s called a quick kiss,” said Hermansyah, a carer at the center, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
“When they make this gesture, it means they are under tremendous stress,” he told AFP.
The fires from slash-and-burn farming-a method to quickly and cheaply clear land for new plantations have so far destroyed 1.7 million hectares in Kalimantan and neighboring Sumatra.
The vast plumes of smoke have drifted over large expanses of Southeast Asia, sickening countless people, disrupting transport, schools and business, and drawing outrage from neighboring governments.
Despite being a near annual occurrence, the toxic cloud is on track to become the worst on record, and staff at the center say the intensity of the smoke and flames at ground zero has never been seen before.