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Thanks to you, Melapi has a safer future.
Your adoption of Melapi is enabling WWF to continue monitoring and protecting her in her natural home - the floodplain of the Kinabatangan river, in eastern Sabah, Malaysia. This wonderful and remote area supports one of the richest wildlife populations in South-east Asia.
In 1997, Melapi and her family group became a focal point of the Orang Utan Conservation Project, set up to find out about orang utans living outside protected areas. Rather than merely accept that these important orang utan populations would ultimately die out, this study is focussing on finding ways to enhance their prospects of long-term survival. And things are looking good.
Two project leaders spend 10 days per month observing the behaviour of Melapi and other orang utans. The rest of their time is spent surveying the area and identifying vegetation. This will help us with our aim of gazetting this important area as a wildlife sanctuary.
As with all WWF projects, a very important aspect of the project is to work closely with the local people of the communities - their involvement is crucial to the success of the project and the long-term survival of the orang utans themselves.
This really is an exciting project which could contribute greatly to one of the hot conversation issues of the moment - whether large species can survive in areas degraded by human activity. Remarkably our findings so far suggest that even in partially logged forests, the orang utans can adapt and survive in relatively high numbers.
Thank you once again for your vital support. Not only are you supporting the orang utans in Malaysia, but you will also be contributing to many more primate projects throughout the world. We will, if we may, send you information not only on the orang utan, but on the chimpanzees in Gashaka Gumti National Park in Nigeria and other WWF primate projects dotted around the world.
Without your help, none of this work would be possible and primates like Melapi would become more vulnerable. So from all of us, thank you once again for supporting us.
[Photo: Melapi in her forest home - the flood plain of the Kinabatangan. Ancrenaz [*]/WWF-UK.]
[Registered Charity No: 201707.]
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[*] The photographer's name may be incorrect as it is difficult to distinguish the name on the scanned leaflet.
Text transcript kindly provided by Loriba.
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