When we are in Bouhachem, we wake up early to catch sight of the macaques. We drag ourselves out from thick woollen blankets and blink into the first sharp rays of sun, dogs bouncing around our feet as we pick across the dusty courtyard to breakfast. The mountains in front of us fade from black to charcoal grey as the sun climbs up from behind them, and the birds compete to greet the day the loudest.
In the car, we fight the lullaby of bumping as the wheels meet years of rain washed paths, fixing sleep-soaked eyes on the patient army of oaks that line the slopes above us and the canyons below. The first glimpse is a flash of sand coloured life against the grey of the road ahead, and we fall into a silence tense with excitement as the car slows to a halt. The first glimpse is soon two and then three, as fallen oak leaves spring suddenly to life, becoming monkeys as they dart out in front of us. Some run with focused speed, only brief glances acknowledging our stares. Others stop, wise faces looking back over characteristic round shoulders as they contemplate their next move. We lean out of our windows as far as we dare, squinting through binoculars and trying to make our cameras see this scene as we do - to love it just as much. In a small, spreading pool of water to our right, last year's babies wet their feet and hands, carefully scooping tiny morsels to try, furtively and with sideways looks, between splashing bouts of play. They bounce off the ground with springs for legs, almost as if the carpet of leaves is tossing them into the air, joining their game. Others hang from trees above, testing branches only just thick enough to take their weight. In slow motion, they get closer to the ground, twisting and swinging and suspended for long moments, then suddenly letting go, as if someone has pressed play again. They scatter, some to the water and some, away from us, into the shadows under the trees. In the distance, careful mothers hold on to tiny black-haired babies, slender fingers cradling wobbly heads and supporting fragile backs, not yet ready to let go. As we watch, suppressing delighted sound, one young adult creeps closer, curiosity overcoming natural fear. Contemplative, he takes his time to find a seat where he can watch us watching him, walking for a while among sun-splattered rocks before finally choosing a place. In the warm light, he is brown and sandy and silver, and his eyes are clear and calm. He holds his feet in his hands - unmistakably, endearingly, a macaque - and he sits. We hold on to our excitement, gripping our binoculars and cameras and notebooks tighter as we lower them to our laps, look quickly, happily, at each other, and look back at him. When he is ready, he turns to leave; he is just right, here in the wild, and we are happy to see him go. I am currently working in Morocco with Barbary Macaque Awareness and Conservation, without whom I wouldn't have the privilege of seeing Barbary macaques in the wild. To support our work, please look at our current initiatives on our social media channels, or contact info@barbarymacaque.org.
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On a hot afternoon where a heavy, white sky threatened rain, we inched through the traffic in Medan, dodging pedestrians as they darted in front of us in their hurry. Already tense with sickening foresight, we stepped out of the air-conditioned safety and sidestepped the women selling peanuts for the monkeys. Withdrawing into a silence that might insulate my mind, I followed everyone else, matching their slow, reluctant footsteps as they moved towards the frantic siamang song that split the humid air. They were quiet when we reached them, faces pressed against the black metal that kept them in place. Passing families threw peanuts at them and still they stared, eyes fixed on the trees beyond us as we fixed ours on the dirty water and the concrete floor.
Behind us, a lone Japanese macaque paced, stopping only to snatch peanut missiles from the air with detached resignation. His neighbours, lanky storks picking their way around their cage on impossible stilt-like legs, cawed in competition with the aggressive buzz of the flies that formed a heaving black carpet on their forgotten tray of uneaten fish. On we walked, falling into step behind an emaciated horse who wandered dispiritedly, her halter dragging on the ground a reminder that nobody cared. In a cage barely bigger than his body, another male macaque paced, emanating a fear that seeped into my stomach even as it compelled me to look away. We found the orangutans, flame hair unnatural against bleak concrete as they sat on the ground waiting for nothing. The younger one, alone in a space too big and bare, clung uncertainly to the metal gate, resting tentatively on spindly legs and taking in his tiny world with fearful eyes. Behind the iron bars of his box around the corner, Pongky watched impassively, one eye white with age. His long fingers reached occasionally towards us, then curled away again as he turned to the side and looked back into the dark. He chose a piece of plastic from the collection strewn across the floor, and chewed on it carefully, thoughtfully, with a gentleness that belied his strength. He was still there as we walked away, and he watched us go with an acceptance born of inevitability. He was still there when we got home that night, and he is still there now. We wanted to leave the zoo then; we were sad and ashamed and felt claustrophobic in the cloying atmosphere of heat and the approaching end of lives that were not really being lived at all. We passed the tigers on our way out, and none of us had ever seen a cat lie flat and motionless in stagnant water before. We passed the sun bears, and as the clouds broke their silence, muffling the continuous roars of fear, the repeated nodding and retching of the smallest of the group burned itself on our minds. We walked away in the rain, making hopeless small talk in a futile attempt to quiet the noise in our minds. We knew we were in a place where animals wait to die, and we knew it was not the only one. On the first day, a few hours before dusk, we crossed a river, wading thigh-deep and slipping on smooth rock as the water tried to push us downstream. To our left, tall, straight rubber trees oozed slow white streams, oblivious to the monkeys dashing inelegantly along their branches. To our right, the oil palms were an illusion of forest, shading us with green, only their regimented formation and the bare ground at their feet to reveal the deception. As we walked, we learned of labour-intensive rubber production affected by time and rain, and the relative ease of a crop that needs harvesting only once every two weeks. We learned of monkeys and orangutans eating the fruits of trees designed to supplement income, and as we crested a hill, we saw the brown furrows of a nearby peak denuded of its trees, bare and desolate and a barrier to the monkeys and orangutans choosing fruit elsewhere.
On the second day, a few hours after dawn, we swelled in number and we crossed the river again. We passed through fields where even the oil palms were absent, only blackened trunks surviving the poisoning that makes way for a new generation. With increasing heat came decreasing talk, our solemn feet leaving the plantations further behind, tripping over roots and slipping into shallow water as the wild pushed its way past the rubber trees and came to meet us. Hope flared with new nests above our heads, then disappeared as the branches we craned our necks towards stayed still in the hot, wet air and the orangutans remained in our imagination. The mosquitoes joined us on our search, their constant whine biting into our consciousness as the sting of their bites tattooed angry lumps onto our skin. On the third day, we drove to Langkat, hopeful that the orangutans would not evade us there. Here, the palms were fewer and the forest feeling stronger, pervading our senses and making our footsteps clumsy in a habitat made for the arboreal. A farmer stopped us; he had seen an orangutan that morning and we followed his outstretched arm with our eyes and then our feet, coming to rest in the shadow of some tall trees where we caught our breath until a flash of orange took it away again. He swung effortlessly across our line of sight, demonstrating his long arms and reminding us that we're earthbound. Stumbling more than walking, hands grabbing roots and clasping at thick soil in our hurry, we followed him to a pandan tree and sat on a fallen trunk to listen as he ate. We had found him, and now we could not lose him again. Four of us sat quietly at the edge of a path, watching as he rested in the heat of the day, and two drove to Medan, to find the vet, find the transport cage, and, with phone calls and negotiations, find him a safer place to live. As the hours wore on, we barely moved. We ate carefully as he slept, talked in hushed tones and followed him at a distance when he moved in search of food, our heads heavy and swimming in the heat as he led us into a valley where the mosquitoes reached fever pitch and the shriek of cicadas drilled into our brains. Contemplative, he ate termites from a piece of bark, then sat still for a while, moving only for an occasional cough as the sun began to dim from painful heat to muted light. A phone call from the road told us help was on its way, and we joked with quiet laughs as we waited. We started to get comfortable and he moved again, gaps between trees disappearing under his easy swing. We caught up with him at the pandan tree, his kiss-squeaks of warning fading to silence as we planted our feet and kept our heads low. Fruit in hand, he looked at us with mild interest and a trust that hit our stomachs with a fist of guilt. The chainsaws buzzed in the background as his careful hands picked the fruit apart, finding the best bits gently, slowly, because he had no idea his time was short. I focused my shaking hands and racing mind on my camera, fighting an urge to lie on the ground and cry. When angrily brushing tears away didn't stop them chasing each other down my face, I sat and looked at him, silent with a sudden despair I hadn't prepared for. He looked back, still calm, and I willed him to understand what we were about to do. He made his night nest as the team from Medan arrived, tired and frustrated and still negotiating a safe place to take him, so we left him in the gathering gloom of dusk, hoping he would still be there tomorrow. Tomorrow came at 5 am, with a hurried breakfast and clothes still damp from the days before. It was 22 degrees when we got in the car, then 28 as we left the village, then 32 as we assembled our equipment and our minds in the palm oil field at the boundary of his piece of forest. He was waking up as we got to the pandan tree by the path and moved away as the team got ready, perhaps, now, sensing what was to come. Quick and practised, the team went after him, the tranquiliser dart they carried all too real and stark. They caught up with him and then I caught up with them, his body suddenly diminished as he hung by one arm above the net they held ready. Minutes passed slowly and then all in a rush as he lost his grip and hurtled to the ground. His face in the net was beautiful in the saddest possible way as his long, nimble fingers reached out and found only thin air. Watching as if from a thousand miles away, I felt hope and grief spike light and heavy as human hands stroked long orangutan hair, reassuring him through the fear that pierced the sedatives and made his breath rasp. We walked out of the forest in file, his weight exhausting the men who carried him, and his strength overcoming the drugs one, two, three times. As we reached the slope that led us to the car, the newly naked stumps of trees seemed to taunt us, too glossy in their pale wood and halo of dust, and still the chainsaws sang. The orangutan in this story is a 60 kg young adult male who lived in fragmented forest that grows around farmed rubber trees in Langkat, North Sumatra. The fragment of forest is now bordered by palm oil, and every day the forest shrinks, chainsaws and bulldozers clearing it to make way for the palm oil plantations to expand. On 15th April 2014, Orangutan Information Centre's (OIC) Human and Orangutan Conflict Response Unit (HOCRU) rescued the orangutan from a habitat no longer safe for him to continue living. This is a last resort; it happens only when there is no other way to ensure an orangutan's survival. Later that day, after the events described above, the orangutan was taken to Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program's quarantine facility, where he will remain for 30 days before being relocated to a new forest home. Along with wildlife photographer Andrew Walmsley, I had the privilege of witnessing the dedication and hard work of the HOCRU team thanks to Sumatran Orangutan Society and, of course, the entire staff of OIC. I am incredibly grateful to them all. In a forest where tall palms trail brown skirts of discarded leaves and hornbills break the atmosphere above the canopy with a rush of air like a giant shaking sheets of cardboard, we walked to find the monkeys with feet as light as possible and muscles tense with expectation. The air was heavy and pressed damply on our skin as the cicadas swelled to fever pitch and dead wood crumbled underfoot with muffled groans, and the slightest incline left us gasping, but determined to continue. Pigs ran alongside us for a while, keeping us company in our domesticity as we walked towards the wild.
The first monkey was black hair and pink skin retreating, taunting us with his unhurried, effortless stride as he melted back into the green. Then, as if to order and with a suddenness that stopped us in our tracks, we were outnumbered by curious faces, heads cocked to one side, contemplative stares as hands like ours in miniature scratched at characteristically hunched backs. Minutes became hours as we forgot the heat and the sting of insects, and the sweat dripping down our backs and into our eyes felt like nothing at all. As we followed our family through their home, it felt like our home too. We stood in the shade as they basked in the sun, stretching skinny arms toward the sky and inspecting themselves and each other with concentration so familiar and so endearing. We laughed as quietly as possible as juveniles with their freshly-coiffed crests descended from straight-backed trees with all four limbs wrapped around the trunk and bent willowy branches almost to breaking under the weight of their play, and looked at each other in wide-eyed delight as white-faced babies took shaky steps and tried to join in. The occasional glance, the heads tilted up to us and eyebrows raised in question let us know they knew we were there, but also that it was okay. Our hearts lifted and we forgot how to breathe in our excitement, and we didn't expect to leave the forest carrying a sadness sharp and shiny in its newness. She appeared from nowhere, normal at first but with an approaching sense of something amiss. Pale legs, pathetically small, trailed underneath her in the leaves and mud, and her companion grimaced at us in warning. She stopped a few metres away, grooming her baby with the last tragic vestiges of hope as we looked at each other with sinking hearts. The group moved on and she followed; we gathered ourselves and continued with them. In a break in the canopy, they played and groomed, noisily reinforcing their bonds as they tumbled and stretched in shafts of light. In the shade, back turned and with only her baby for company, she was the loneliest figure in the world. She bowed her head, motionless in poignant reflection of the tiny body in her arms. Silence settled around her as the minutes passed and the chatter of her family broke her stare for only the briefest of moments. Another female approached, wearing the lines of age on her face as she sat down and quietly started grooming. A young male, harmlessly curious, reached out to touch the baby. Her silent scream shocked him into stillness as her hand on his wrist warned him away. He sat and looked, head bowed like hers, moving gently to grasp a handful of her hair as he started to understand. We sat and looked, in tears because we understood too. The monkeys in this story are Sulawesi crested black macaques (Macaca nigra), Critically Endangered primates endemic to North Sulawesi. I was able to see them thanks to my hosts at Selamatkan Yaki and the fantastic guides at Tangkoko Nature Reserve. |