A corridor now links two forests orangutans had been stuck between
A 9km strip of replanted forest now joins two reserves that had been separated by cleared land since the 1990s. A camera caught an orangutan using it within a month.
Animals trapped in a forest fragment slowly run out of mates and food. The two reserves either side of this gap had been cut off from each other since the 1990s, when the land between them was cleared. An orangutan in one could not reach the other without crossing open ground.
The corridor that now joins them is a 9km strip of replanted forest. It is narrow, in places only a couple of hundred metres wide, but it is continuous canopy, and that is the thing that matters. An orangutan can cross it without coming down to the ground, where it is exposed to dogs, people and the simple risk of being somewhere it does not know.
The Long Pasai community planted most of the strip and patrols it. They chose a planting mix heavy on fast-growing fruiting trees, partly to close the canopy quickly and partly because a corridor with food in it is one an animal will actually linger in rather than rush through.
It was their camera trap that caught the proof. In February the image came back of a young female crossing about halfway along the strip, unhurried, feeding as she went. That was the first hard evidence the corridor is doing its job rather than just looking good on a map.
We are careful not to read too much into one animal. A single crossing is not a restored population, and the corridor will need years and many more crossings before we can say it has reconnected the two groups in any genetic sense.
But it is the first time anything has moved between these forests in roughly thirty years, and the people who planted the strip watched it happen on their own camera. That is worth more than a survival figure on a spreadsheet.
