A Rare Look at the Secret Life of Orangutans | Short Film Showcase

something like seven million years ago there was nothing like a human on earth there was not even a pre human standing upright there were simply great apes very much like the ones that live with us today [Music] I was crossing the river at dawn it was just getting light and I was jumping from stone to stone to try not to get my boots wet as I crossed this broad stream and in the middle I pause then I looked down the stream just to kind of you know woke up and down the stream just to check out the view and when I looked downstream just about 20 meters away from me maybe 30 meters away from me at the most there was a big male or onit on and he hadn't seen me because he was doing the same thing as me he was going the other direction trying to cross the river without getting his feet wet I just was so struck by the fact that what he was doing was so similar to what I was just doing and I just felt like you know to a sort of passing the morning dawn there [Music] we usually have to get up really early so maybe 3:30 in the morning wake up and then get ready and we really need to be at the run upon Ness by 5:00 a.m. when they wake up so that means you ready and then hiking could be up to an hour and the rain forest in the dark using our headlamp to the nest one of the things that makes a heart is actually finding them they're primarily solitary and so it actually takes a long time to find them they can they can go outside of our of our study area it may take us like a week of search days of their person days to actually find their aunt on it's not realistic to just what hunter force myself and go find a neurotic on the photograph it's not gonna happen so I'm always teaming up with a research team that are already trusting followed in Toronto [Music] [Music] [Music] in the whole world ironic on only lived in one area two big islands of Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia and within those islands of course they only lives in the remaining good areas of rainforest one of those is a national park called zoom polymers where I've been working for for twenty years with my wife Sheryl and that's where she has a long-term runtime project our site is deep in the interior of that National Park and it comprises the eight different habitats [Music] tamo national in american prostitute ama national Tolan capti indonesia Canisius Karen Tama national goon voluma della paura Hindu suppose away an eternity Diprivan kawasan inwardly a certificate are ya guru paul national park is this huge area over a hundred thousand hectares in size and challenge County Research Station which is where we've carried out most of the proton research academic pound is only two thousand hectares and these are on atoms the wrong times we study at chellah Ponte they don't necessarily stay within those two thousand hectares all the time so my goal was to stay with these wrong tones for five days sometimes up to ten days in a row over the course of an entire year by staying with them for these long periods I was also able to document really unique behaviors that haven't been captured before so before I studied biology and anthropology in college I really had no idea that other species had culture besides humans and so when I saw these cultural traditions in Iran for the first time it was sort of a really big sight to behold it was my first day and I was out early in the morning to go to Cho that's nest and when I got there I had never seen her on the town in the wild not even in the zoo and I was under his tree waiting for him to wake up sometime around 5:30 in the morning first thing he did was he let out this really loud long call right above me [Music] it was a very powerful experience it was not a sound that I for anything like it to meet culture is such a human element and to see in other species is really fascinating culture means so much to humans so almost everything we do is cultural both with feeding traditions and with social traditions you see things that are inherited from mother to child for sometimes adopted from friend to friend that show that behavior has got this wonderful flexibility adaptability that is so much of a characteristic of humans and seen in the great apes [Music] so around towns do this vocalization called kiss squeaking it's done by cursing their lips and making a kissing sound like like a roll much louder vocalization this week is a not a threat sound that they make when they actually meet an unfamiliar onit on they also do it to people sometimes including pollen they do this using leaves they grab some liens they bring it up to their mouth they do this kiss squeak and then they throw the leaves out at other field sites they may not use the leaves at all this is an example of a local custom that's found in that area similar to the way people greet each other differently in different countries maybe in some place you know people shake hands another place they bow so wrong times are also showing these interesting cultural variations between sites [Music] I've always been fascinated understand you know why we're human what makes us human you know we had so many kinds of humans in the past and different kinds of bipedal Apes you know Oscar put the scenes and we had some that went extinct and some that didn't and then involved into human so you know why is that you know why did some population of also put the scenes eventually evolved into the Homo genus I think that the human species is incredibly fortunate to have in orangutans and the other great apes gorillas and bonobos and chimpanzees representatives of what we came from we still share of varying a large percentage of our DNA with maybe around 97% orangutans survived one window into understanding human evolution [Music] there's different ways that bronze ons make umbrellas one way is they just break off an entire branch and sort of modify this branch to make an umbrella other times they pull the entire branch towards then make a little roof over the head some were on a tongue when they're making a nest and it's still raining really hard they would actually make a big roof over their nests they can put together a bunch of branches and leaves and sort of weave hovering and that's a really effective way for them to stay dry while they're sleeping to all the great apes make this and they're the only primate that makes nest that's important because they have large bodies and it's a way that they can sleep in the trees where they're safer from ground predators there seems to be variation and kind of some subtleties of nest building we heard some researchers from another site describing that they made a pillow to go in the nest and we thought oh you know we've never seen that right but we'd never have thought about it like we just thought of making a nest building a platform and lying down and we never watched that closely well once we heard these researchers and other sites say that if they saw around convicting a pillow we started watching more carefully and then and then sure enough like we noticed that there are cons that good and pollen we're also sometimes making a pillow it's putting it down just as they plop down on top of it and so as researchers you know learn more and more about our own towns and know what flushes to ask know what to look for you know we're learning more interesting things it is so precious to be able to understand our connection to the natural world to have these other species to give us lessons and remind us where we come from it makes us in some ways humble it also makes us fascinated and yet we risk losing them all newton guitar and render it rock a paean young you can cover stock arendelle a student of Turin green de totora Trujillo energetically mountain yam a sativa every bit of course that's waah gnorga Ron can't live anymore because it's turning to alcohol plantation or burn down is not good for our caste and that's the main reason that number of Ron towns have been declining drastically over the last few decades it's because of the huge amount of forest in Borneo and Sumatra that have been lost in 2016 orangutan became critically endangered they are in a very top level of threatened category their numbers are decreasing at a more rapid rate than we had initially thought and they are in need of immediate conservation action it's gonna be a race against time to be able to document what are the cultural variation before they just disappear forever every lock on life is really important they only have an average of the baby about once every seven or eight years the longest of birth spacing of any mammal so with their slow rate of reproduction a lot of dogs simply can't sustain any kind of reduction in their population like that over the long term this century we could lose all of the orangutans if it carries on the rate of devastation in Borneo and Sumatra that's been seen in the recent decades we stand so much to gain and we stand so much to lose yes you can't protect what you don't know we can't all go to Borneo or Smosh or we can't all go to the rainforest there but we can bring the rainforest to people through through a media coverage all right first shot all that practice yesterday you don't [Music] Oh murders every population is different and the more we study them some more different we realize they are [Music] when you see in Arakan I'm looking back at you you can you know sense up there is something there in those eyes you know they're thinking it's hard to imagine that we could just sort of what's that goats name you [Music]

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 1,805,104

Rating: 4.8663106 out of 5

Keywords: Short film showcase, national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, Showcase, short films, filmmakers, wildlife films, films, Secret Life of Orangutans, Short Film, Vanishing Lowland, Wild Orangutans, Unique Cultural Behaviors, Cheryll Knott, Unique Orangutan Behaviors, Robert Suro, Orangutan Habitats, PLivjPDlt6ApRiBHpsyXWG22G8RPNZ6jlb, PLivjPDlt6ApTjurXykShuUqp7LQcj9s8s, PLivjPDlt6ApTDlm7OufY6HAzNmFAqxWSo

Id: 0fts6x_EE_E

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/robinlyon222]

So I’ve been pronouncing orangutan incorrectly my whole life is my biggest take away...

[u/Buzzlight_Year]

Well it's not secret anymore

[u/IlaDT]

Thanks!