Bastarin and Sutejo wanted to make an arrest. But they had only one canoe and no backup, except an environmental researcher and a reporter. So they did the next best thing. They delivered a sermon and a warning.
"It's true that you can make money cutting trees," Bastarin told the loggers. "I know. I used to log in these parts. But if you keep doing that, your children and grandchildren won't have any forest left to enjoy."
An orangutan awaits transfer to a rehab center in Borneo.
(Ellen Nakashima - The Washington Post)
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The loggers, all cousins or brothers, nodded in agreement. They said they worked for a man named Iss, who lived in Pontianak, the capital of western Kalimantan province, and that people more powerful than they controlled the logging wealth.
"If I had five cows, I would look after those five cows instead of coming to the jungle, but where do I get the money for five cows?" asked Khalifa's older brother, Abdullah, 32.
The chat was civil, even amiable. But Sutejo made the warning clear.
"Today had better be your last day," he told the loggers.
The orangutan protection squad is vastly outnumbered and on a tight budget. A squad member's pay is $65 a month. Forty-two forest rangers with five guns patrol the 225,000-acre park. Theirs is a race against time, to bring law enforcement to the jungle before the orangutan -- "the man of the jungle" in Malay -- becomes extinct.
At the peak of logging activity in the last year, environmentalists said, there were about 1,000 loggers at any given time in the park, only 30 percent of which remains untouched. Despite vows to crack down, successive governments have failed to stop the multibillion-dollar illegal logging business, and environmental activists blame corruption, a lack of will and scarce enforcement resources.
The day after the encounter with the loggers, Bastarin and 11 community and forest rangers tromped into the wet jungle on the park's northwest fringe, fording leech-filled streams and boot-sucking rice paddies. To clear a path, a young ranger whacked vines with a machete.
Every five minutes or so, Bastarin paused and peered up into the trees. "There," he said eventually, pointing to a tuft of dried leaves and branches high in a tree. An orangutan nest, in good condition, but more than a month old.
Orangutans build their nests about 40 feet off the ground in trees, bending and weaving branches into a green, leafy bed. They make a new one every night.
Over several hours, the group spotted eight nests, several gibbons and red monkeys. But no orangutans. Sometimes patrols go a week without a sighting.
Squad member Ibrahim Sindang is a Dayak, a member of an ethnic group that has lived in Borneo for centuries. The Dayaks still occasionally hunt orangutans and eat them when they cannot find other meat or fish.
Sindang, 30, helps rescue poached orangutans. On a recent morning, he visited a transfer center run by the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program, known locally as Yayasan Palung and headed by a Harvard University anthropologist.
