OBJECTIVE

*To allow peers/community to contribute in the orang-utan conservation efforts.

Orangutans...who?

The Malay word orangutan means "person of the forest". These long haired, orangish primates are found only in Sumatera and Borneo, are highly intelligent nd are close relatives of humans.

They are highly intelligent mammals - they share alomst 97% of the human DNA.


Extinction They Face.

Orang-utans in Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak occur mainly in the lowlands. In Sarawak, there are about 1,300 orang-utans, almost all in the Lanjak-Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary and Batang Ai National Park in the south next to West Kalimantan, Indonesia. In Sabah, there were five main areas of special importance with a total of 20,000 orang-utans in the mid 1980s (by WWF-Malaysia working with the Sabah Forestry Depratment, 1986)

By 2004, the orang-utan population in Sabah had dropped to about 11,000 individuals (by Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project working with Sabah Wildlife Deparment, 2003). This decline in their numbers in the last twenty years was caused by planned conversion of forests to plantations in the eastern lowlands.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Datanglah ke Zoo Negara! :D

Dear reader,

How is your school holidays going on? Here's a suggestion on how you can spend an interesting holiday.. Be a VOLUNTEER!

On 26th August 09, my team members plus a friend volunteered at our very own Zoo Negara.
The original plan was to organized a trip, for volunteering but my team decided to go check it out first :D
We left Subang Jaya at 630am to drive to Kelana Jaya LRT station, as we have to reach Zoo Negara by 8am. Since it was still dark ,and the sun has not rise.. most of us were still dead sleepy :P

HOW TO GET THERE? We took a ride in the LRT, which cost RM2.50 each, from Kelana J to Wangsa Maju.
Surprisingly, we reached at Wangsa Maju station at 735am SHARP. So kudos to our time management system *self praise*. Anyways, from Wangsa Maju station we had to take a cab to Zoo Negara. It cost us RM10 (so RM2 each). But of course, there are other alternatives. You can take the bus, (rapid KL U-34)which goes straight to the Zoo) but it was 730am and I guess not many people go to the Zoo so early, so the bus driver didn't wanna go.

FUN is just the right word to describe the day. We were told that the five of us were gonna do different stuff, but it all involves helping the keeper. Afie and John were with a same keeper- dealing with monkeys. Diyana and I were helping our keeper- with monkeys and gibbons. And Andrew was with the hippopotamus! :P

I'm not too sure on what the rest did (wait for their post,coming up soon) but here's what Diyana and I did :D
First, we had to clean the cages. YES, POOH! haha. The smell was ...well you know. Fortunately our keeper was kind ,he just made us help him pull the water pipe. But we got to go into the cages to be with the gibbons (very scarily fun), and FEEDING time was super duper awesome =D

The highlight of my day, was after cleaning the pooh and cage. One of the monkey climb on me and wanted to play. So I ended up carrying it around, in its cage :D

10am-1025am was break time. After that, the five of us were back together to help WOX with enrichment! We helped out with the primates. Apparently most of the primates here are "bored". So to keep them busy and to show more about their natural behaviour, This is what enrichment is for! We had to come out with ideas on how to get them busy. For example, we stuffed kuaci in apples and pears and let the primates think on how to get the kuaci out. (They ended up squashing the apple) :D

Reached home at 645pm. It was a long, tiring day. Yet it was such an experience :)

I'm not going to bore you with words. So wait up for the next post of pictures!


Cheers,
Cherlyn (:
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