After photographing tigers and tapirs in one of Sumatra’s least known wildernesses, an unlikely pair of conservationists are hoping to discover a hidden population of orangutans in high altitude forests – and who knows what else.
Jeremy Hance The Guardian 10 May 17;
Just a few years ago this place had no name. And in fact its new moniker – Hadabaun Hills – is the sole creation of Indonesian conservationist Haray Sam Munthe. Hadabaun means “fall” in the local language – Munthe suffered a terrible one in these hills while looking for tigers in 2013. But Hadabaun or Fall Hills remains unrecognised by the Indonesian governments and is a blank spot on the world’s maps – though it may be one of the last great refuges for big mammals on the island of Sumatra.
Last year a ragtag, independent group of local and international conservationists, led by Munthe and Greg McCann of Habitat ID, used camera traps to confirm Sumatran tigers and Malayan tapirs in these hills. Next month they hope to uncover a lost population of Sumatran orangutans.
“I’d call it a Noah’s Ark for endangered and critically endangered species amidst an ocean of palm oil plantations,” said Greg McCann, the Project Coordinator for Habitat ID.
McCann, an American who lives in Taiwan, spends much of his time swashbuckling Indiana Jones-style across south-east Asia’s last remaining – and highly threatened – rainforests. It’s a passion with a purpose: McCann’s group, Habitat ID, is working to document rare species in a bid to convince governments, NGOs and the public to care about long-overlooked forests.
Hadabaun Hills is their latest target.
“Not so long ago nearly the entire island of Sumatra was blanketed in tropical rainforest. Today the mountain ranges that are too steep for big plantations are the default wildlife refuges, relics of the once great forests that were never documented by science,” McCann said. “This is where wildlife makes its last stand.”
Sumatra has changed remarkably in the last few decades, from an island of villages and wilderness to one of vast monoculture plantations of pulp and paper and palm oil. Since 1985 the island has lost more than half its lowland forest, and it continues to have one of the highest deforestation rates on the planet. Its large mammals – many of which are found nowhere else in the world – have undergone a severe contraction, leaving them at risk of total extinction.
McCann first visited the Hadabaun Hills in 2016 after being invited by Munthe. In a short trip the pair saw siamang (the world’s biggest gibbons), lar gibbons, rhinoceros hornbills, Oriental pied hornbills and Argus pheasant, among other species.
But it was the two camera traps – just two – that they left behind that really proved the promise of Hadabaun Hills. In just one month they photographed their first Malayan tapir, a species categorised as endangered on the IUCN Red List with its population believed to have dropped by more than half in the last 36 years.
And in three months’ time a Sumtran tiger posed for the camera. Fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers are believed to survive in the wild today and the species continues to be decimated by deforestation, snaring and poaching. Munthe runs the Sumatran Tiger Rangers, a group working to protect the top predator by removing snares, and working to mitigate human-tiger conflict. This is Indonesia’s last tiger: the Javan went extinct in the 1970s.
The team’s camera traps also photographed golden cat, sun bear, Malayan porcupine, Sumatran porcupine, wild pig and pig-tailed macaque, proving the area is bursting with threatened Sumatran mammals.
This year McCann and Munthe plan to trek far further into a mountaintop forest dubbed the “extreme area” by Munthe. First they will take a boat to the bottom of the hills and then cut their way through the forest to reach a little village where they hope to convince a local to guide them to the top of the mountains.
“We’ll be likely bushwhacking to this hamlet and startling the local residents with a small contingent of bu-lays [the local name for foreigners] emerging wet and muddy from nearby jungle for the first time ever,” McCann said. “I expect to see children scattering in every direction and to hear Siamangs and hornbills in the forest beyond. After the hamlet we are in terra incognita.”
They plan to spend seven days trekking into and through the “extreme area”. Beyond local people, few – if any – have ever been here, but it’s this high-altitude forest that may be home to an undiscovered population of Sumatran orangutans. These great apes – a different species from those in Borneo – are classified as critically endangered and have a total population of around 14,000.
Since Sumatran orangutans rarely, if ever, touch down from the trees, McCann and Munthe don’t expect to catch them on camera. Instead they hope to find orangutan nests, photograph them, and bring back the images for confirmation by experts.
The team also hopes a new army of camera traps will document the Sunda clouded leopard, helmeted hornbill, the Sumatran striped rabbit and the Sumatran muntjac, a type of small deer that McCann describes as so rare as to be “ near-mythical”.
“There’s even a very slim possibility of finding Sumatran rhinoceros,” McCann said. “Last year we camped on a plateau at about 600 metres that went by the name of Rhinoceros Hill. Historically, there were rhinos in this region. When did the last one get poached out? Probably nobody knows.”
Pretty much every big mammal in Sumatra is threatened, but Sumatran rhinos have the terrible honour of being one of the rarest mammals on the planet: less than 100 survive today. And a subspecies found in Borneo is on the verge of total extinction.
Munthe said that in his explorations he has found rhino dung in the Hadabaun Hills. Confirming rhinos there would be a major boon to a species so close to vanishing.
Indeed, Hadabaun Hills remains a land so removed it’s full of rumours. Munthe said locals claim to run into a “large black monkey” in the hills. There is also talk of a mythical tribe of humans known as the Suke Mante in this area. Munthe was also told by a local that at the top of the mountain lives a “black-furred, orangutan-like creature walks on two legs”. Historically there have been numerous reports of an unidentified ape in Sumatra called the “orang pendek”, which is similar to an orangutan but smaller with brown-to-black fur and a penchant for walking on the ground.
But no one has brought back any real proof of his legendary animal – and many believe that even if such an animal ever existed it has likely been wiped out in Sumatra’s ecological catastrophe.
None of the Hadabaun Hills is formally protected. About half the area is considered community forest and the other has no status, according to McCann. On the ground, he said, it didn’t matter what was community-run and what remained without any formal status.
“It’s all under threat from agricultural encroachment, logging, road building, snaring – all the usual suspects.”
McCann and Munthe asked that the exact location of the Hadabaun Hills remain unpublished due to concerns that such information could lead to an increase in poachers. Munthe said he feared poachers were already entering this lost world.
“I have mentioned the Hadabuan Hills and its scarce animals to the forestry minister and the head of the district administration. Until now there is no help to protect [the Hadabaun Hills] from the government,” Munthe said.
Most of the world’s biggest conservation groups have a presence in Sumatra – such as WWF, WCS, and Conservation International – but none of them have explored this particular forest.
“Funding for new conservation projects seems difficult to come by, and in the past the large NGOs poured their time and money into places like Gunung Leuser National Park and Kerinci National Park – and with good reason,” McCann explained. “Those places are so important, so magical, and they need urgent protection.”
But still McCann worries about a “curiosity crisis” in conservation today, pointing to the lack of interest in the Hadabaun Hills as an example.
“Why aren’t scientists and conservationists seeking out these last holdouts?” he asks, noting tantalisingly that Hadabaun Hills isn’t the only unexplored area of Sumatra.
“Sumatra is one of the last places where you can use Google Earth, zoom around on the map and wonder: ‘What might be lurking in there? It’s not a national park or a protected area. What’s in there?’ Nobody knows except the locals.”
But McCann’s organisation, Habitat ID, almost had to cancel the expedition due to a lack of funding. Instead these rogue conservationists have decided to press ahead by paying for most the trip out of pocket and scaling back initial plans. All this despite the fact that the team had already documented tapirs and tigers in Hadaban Hills.
McCann said the team was close to securing funding for the expedition until the donor asked to see government data on Hadabaun Hills. But, of course, there is none.
“That’s the reason why we want to explore it – it’s an empty page for wildlife surveying,” said McCann.
Without more funding, the team is left self-funding the bulk of the trip and missing out on the potential of bringing more camera traps to increase their chance of documenting rare or even new species.
A struggle to secure funding is not new to McCann, who ran into the same issue when trying to document wildlife in Virachey National Park in Cambodia. McCann was able to prove that Virachey was home to many threatened mammals, including elephants, even though big conservation groups had largely abandoned the park.
“I think that money will only go where money is,” McCann said. “Few want to go it alone; it’s seen as being too risky … if another NGO is already working there and you can collaborate and share, then your chances of landing funding shoot up. So places that enjoy some level of NGO support will get more support, and ones that don’t will languish.”
But such shortsightedness means that exploratory expeditions have trouble getting off the ground and small NGOs like McCann’s – with far less overhead and often a larger penchant for risk-taking – struggle to find the funds to survive.
“We really had the wind taken out of our sails on this when we didn’t get the funding and it almost killed the project,” McCann said. But he is now turning to crowdfunding in a bid to raise some extra funds for more camera trapping on their trip.
In our age there are fewer and fewer places like Hadabuan Hills – newly named, wholly unexplored – yet that’s the draw for adventurers and conservationists like McCann and Munthe.
“When you trek up into the inmost heart of the mountains like we will be doing, and in an untrodden area such as this, mysteries may reveal themselves,” McCann said.
It sounds like language out of another time, another age: but for all our hubris our little planet – third from the sun – remains full of mysteries. Most of the species on Earth have never been documented or named by scientists and there are places – even on an island like Sumatra which has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world – where every turn, every snapshot of a camera trap, could reveal a new world.
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