Antaphobia

We have seen our fair share of wildlife in 6 weeks of travel. If you revisit our previous blog entries from Maui, Dubai, Jakarta, and Malaysia, you'll see a plethora of exotic creatures. We had close encounters with a number of endangered species including the humpback whale (Maui), Monk Seal (Maui), Green Sea Turtle (Maui), and the orangutan (Malaysia). As seen in our previous video, a mother orangutan and her baby came within inches of us as we watched them in a wildlife reserve near Kuching, Malaysia. These amazing creatures are on the endangered species list and can be found in the wild on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on the island of Borneo (shared by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei). The word orangutan is derived from local Malay and Indonesian words. Orang means "person" and hutan means "forest," thus "person of the forest." These extremely intelligent rainforest dwellers spend roughly 90% of their lives in the trees, so capturing video of 4 different orangutans on the ground was a unique experience. As you can see from the video in our last post, the mother orangutan was not intimidated by us at all. She seemed to make a conscious decision that we were not there to harm her or the baby and then she came out of the canopy toward us. The orangutan's cognitive abilities have led many researchers to believe that orangutans are the world's most intelligent animals other than humans. They have been known to utilize tools, build shelter, and even make rain hats or umbrella-like weather guards. We observed some interesting behavior when we noticed that the mother orangutan and the one that followed her both picked up a hefty rock before climbing from the ground. You can see that they place the rocks in their mouths and then climb the electric pole tether. This is purely speculation, but we thought maybe they grabbed rocks as weapons in case something or someone tried to grab them from behind as they climbed from low areas. Once they reached a higher position in the trees, they dropped the rocks. One thing is for sure, with such a small orangutan population remaining, these close encounters in the wild are a treasure.

The rainforest offered us numerous other moments of awe. One of those moments came as we crossed paths with an astonishing ant trail. The video footage shows approximately 50 yards of ants. A closer look at the above photo shows that the ants were possibly tracking tree bark from point A to point B. The trail appeared to begin high in a tree. And the end of the trail? Well...................................................................................