ZOO NEGARA JUNE 2009
Orangutan Experience

Volunteers:
• Michael Head
• Wendy Head
• Lucy Piper
• Jemma Farrell


Enrichment
Everyday the group happily split in half so whilst two people got the cleaning and scrubbing done in the night dens the others collected leaves to provide the orangutans and chimpanzees with their daily leaf enrichment. Aside from this we also out the following activities………..

Lepat Nasi
One of the apes’ favourites the volunteers had fun making this delicacy by mixing sticky rice and raisins then sealing it into small banana leaf parcels.

Fruit Smoothies
Using the blender donated by a previous group we made smoothies for the apes by blending a mixture of guava and papaya. Although they get these fruits quite often the animals enjoy the change in texture.



Happy Sacks
This month the group made happy sacks that were very loosely tied together. Although this made it easy for the orangutans to extract the seeds and honey from inside, they had lots of fun using the hessian sacks for other games, like hide and seek, and even spent time washing them in the mote surrounding the exhibit.

Bottle piñata
This was a new creation devised by our volunteer Lucy Piper. Our apes love to be given plastic bottles in which we normally place a few seeds and raisins, a drop or two of honey and some leaves and sticks, before screwing the lid on and handing it over. To make it even more difficult for them to get the treats inside Lucy suggested we paper mache the bottle all over , however when we tried giving a bottle to Chokey he obviously recognised the shape and immediately started chewing the top so it didn’t take long to get in! Next time we plan to use more paper to make it harder to tell which end is the top –great new enrichment idea though!

Ice Hose
Another new enrichment idea this month was cutting up small lengths of plastic hose pipe and filling it with sweet corn and raisins then putting in the freezer overnight. The apes really loved this treat especially as the weather has been so hot. To our surprise they didn’t try to bite through the hose even though their strong teeth would have easily allowed this. Instead they found different techniques including holding it over the mouth until it thaws and bites drop down, or running it through the teeth to squeeze out the mush from inside! Tsunami with her small hands used her fingers to poke out the treats from inside her tube. Although Sulong chewed his hose many of the orangutans and chimps were content just to play with the empty tubes, some even handed them back in hope of a refill!

Banana stumps
The volunteers also made banana stump treats by chopping into sections a banana tree and making holes in which they put sun flower seeds and raisins. They were interested to see how the orangutans eat only the middle of the banana trunk but pick apart the rest to find the seeds.

Punkey’s Treasure
During our daily raking of the orangutan exhibit one morning we went to clear away a piece of pink plastic (probably thrown in by a careless tourist) and found something very interesting underneath. Carefully arranged on top of another small piece of plastic was a collection of rocks, which had been covered with the pink plastic and hidden between two tree roots. We are careful to remove rocks from the exhibit as some of our orangutans are able to throw quite hard and we don’t want to risk anyone getting hurt. However we can’t remove all of them and one of our orangutans had clearly been collecting them as it seemed the rocks under the plastic had been selected and neatly arranged. We put the plastic back and left the collection in place, watching over the next few days to see who they might belong too. Then one day when we called the orangutans over to give them their enrichment we realised our lovely Bornean orangutan Punkey was sitting in the same spot and seemed unusually reluctant to come over even for her enrichment. We could only presume she was perhaps guarding something of greater value than a happy sack –a collection of precious stones!!

Labels: baby orangutan, bornean orangutan, enrichment, orangutan, orangutan experience, zoo negara