A dramatic rescue amid the smoke and flames of Central Kalimantan’s forest fires, and the race to bring Bara to safety.
For days, the fire had been eating its way through the land around Mendawai Seberang, in Central Kalimantan. Smoke hung low and thick over the burning oil palm plantation, and the air burned the throat of anyone who stood in it.
Then a local resident noticed something in the haze: an orangutan, clinging to a tree.
He called it in on October 8. The Wildlife Rescue Unit of BKSDA Kalteng set out for the site, coordinating with the team from OF-UK Indonesia along the way. When they arrived, the fire was still burning around the tree. The animal at the top of it was a male orangutan, 22 years old, alone in a landscape that was no longer his own.
Orangutans are built for the canopy. When the forest burns, they have little choice but to flee through the trees, swinging from branch to branch while smoke fills their lungs. Even for humans, breathing in that air is hard to endure. For a wild animal with nowhere left to go, it is a fight to stay alive.
The rescue had to be done with great care. The fire was close, the smoke was dense, and one wrong move could panic the animal into a fall. The team prepared the sedation and spread a rescue net beneath the tree. The sedation worked, and the orangutan dropped gently onto the net, unhurt by the fall.
The team assessing the orangutan’s condition
The team named him Bara. In Indonesian, ‘Bara’ translates to ‘embers’, the glowing remains of a fire.
The medical check found minor burns on his palms and the soles of his feet. The team suspects he had to cross ground the fire had already touched before he reached the tree where he was found. Otherwise, the examination showed he was in good health.
With that verdict, the team decided on translocation to the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. At Camp Buluh, the cage door opened. Bara did not hesitate. He climbed straight up the nearest tree, then disappeared into the forest.
His story ended well, but not every story does. Fire does not only destroy trees. It takes away shelter, food and safety, and it often pushes wildlife into places where they come into conflict with people. A fast rescue matters, but it is only the first step. Animals like Bara still need monitoring afterward: their health, their food supply, the security of their habitat, and the risk of new conflict with humans.
Saving an orangutan does not end when the flames die down and the smoke clears. For Bara, it only began there.
Bara making his way back to the forest
