The Semengoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre is an education facility and temporary home for orphaned, injured or illegally kept endangered Bornean animals such as the orang utan, sun bear, gibbon and hornbill. The animals arrive at the centre near Kuching, Sarawak, after either being confiscated from their owners or brought in by members of the public and park rangers. The main attraction for visitors to the centre is the orang utans which are free to traverse the tree-tops of the 740 hectare jungle reserve. The wardens eventually teach the younger orang utans enough about independence that they can be released back into the wild.
I was fortunate to visit Semengoh after a couple of days of heavy rain. A large percentage of the ~25 orang utans on site were out looking for food whilst the weather was good: Richie the Alpha Male, mothers with babies and cheeky youngsters stealing food when Richie wasn’t looking. They were so joyfully destructive in breaking trees branches to drop onto the people staring up at them from below, in using their weight to swing the flexible trees back and forth and in smashing coconut shells against tree trunks that it almost inspired me to drop all my inhibitions and climb up to join them. Had it not been for the stories of their incredible physical strength of picking up women with a single arm (and of course the watchful eyes of the wardens) I probably would have at least attempted…
