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

ORANG UTAN EXPERIENCE 6th May 09 – 21st May 2009

The Volunteers
From left:
- Angeliki Repapis (37, England)
- Emily Baigent (22, England)
- Amie Hall (18, England)
- Laura Mallet (18, England)

This Month’s Activity

In May 2009, Zoo Taiping
received four very enthusiastic volunteers. Angeliki was an air hostess before she decided to migrate to Manila with her husband. Emily is a university student while Amie and Laura are friends traveling together after their A levels.

Throughout this month there are a few enrichments that we have done besides husbandry work cleaning exhibits and night dens at the Primate section.

The Orangutan’s night dens are filled with leaves and twigs that we collected around the zoo compound in hoping that the orangutans will show signs of nest making. The next morning we observe no signs of nest but surely the orangutans will prefer the leaves for the night for playing with!



With the Orangutans, Wasabi got an adventure with a strip of rattan with thorns still on it. We were there observing her for sometime, worried she might cut herself. But she proves herself intelligent! She manages to rip it by climbing to the platform with the rattan in one hand and push the rattan to the floor. By bending the rattan she manages to break it and strip it.

Next we gave her a big half rotten log and we put some nuts and raisins and we drizzle some honey into it. She played with it for almost three days. At first she went for the honey then the nuts and raisins. After eating all the treats, she began to roll the log and trying to push it around her cage. In the rotten log were natural insects like ants, moths, spider and etc. In the log was hollow and she tried to peek in and see what she can pull out.



We have made a few puzzle feeders as well for Amy the Ruffed Lemur, for the marmosets and tamarin and for Simon and Sally the White Handed Gibbon.

Simon and Sally reactions were terrific. We were a bit worried that they might fight for the coconut feeder because we made only one. We approach the gibbons the same way as with the lemur. Half of their food was presented normally on the platforms and the other half we put in the feeder. We hung it up in their cage from the cage roof. Simon was the first to check it out and Sally came later. They actually took turns to fish out the fruits in the feeder. They ignored the foods on the platform for the first 30 minutes. This feeder made them hung by one hand while the other hand is in the feeder.

The puzzle feeder for Amy the lemur and Simon and Sally the gibbons are similar made out of coconut. The top of the coconut were chopped off and the inside of the coconut were cleaned. Then we fill it with fruits and leaves (green leafy vegetables and browse) and hung it up. We started with Amy’s with half of her feed in her normal feeding plate and the other half in the coconut. She went to the coconut first and sniffed it before going to her plate. After a while she started to chew and put her long mouth inside the opening on top of the coconut. Only by the next day that she begun to pull out the browse and fruits with her hands. This month we also made two swings for Amy. One was made using a plastic basin and the other using a branch.



The marmosets and the tamarins got their apple feeder which is actually an apple with lots of small holes filled with sunflower seeds, peanuts, raisins and honey. The feeder have a through and through hole in the middle of the apple so we can put stings and hang it up. It is a very successful enrichment for them because after they ate all the treats they move on to the apple. The best part is this feeder made them hang upside down and other poses just to get to the tasty foods.

Project Progress
This month we manage to make a lot of enrichments not only for the Orangutans but also for the other Primates such as the marmosets and tamarins, gibbons and lemur. The materials we used in making these enrichments are more natural as well and most of them are not expensive.

Labels: great orangutan project, orangutan, orangutan volunteer