Sun, Jul 5, 2009
The orangutan is highly endangered, having lost nearly all its forests over Asia and rapidly still more to plantations. Conservation will only save it if programs are developed to reintroduce captivity-bred apes to the remaining wild tracts. Such a program in Sabah (northern Malaysian Borneo) shows how complex and hard to learn their lives are, requiring intricate knowledge of the forest, such as edible plants and when they bear fruit, while Charlotte demonstrates her utter ignorance.
Sun, Jul 12, 2009
Charlotte's team joins a German zoologist with a ludicrously large local escort to study mountain gorillas in an Uganda forest reserve, demonstrating her ignorance about that environment as well as poor practical planning. The apes prove rather elusive and the jungle weather a terrible spotting-spoilsport. The family of 17 has a rather strict hierarchy where only the youngsters enjoy exemption from the rule of the biggest. The system makes the silver-back their benign despot as well as protector, with two black-back males in waiting, yet the most enterprising one sneakily mates most females too. Nearly all their time is spend eating as their vegetable diet requires an incredible mass of food.