Head wildlife carer Herman parks the ute and we grab backpacks and start walking, following a mossy trail past coffee bean trees and banana palms into the jungle. Clambering over the buttressed roots of decades-old strangler figs, the haunting song of siamang gibbons echoing through the mist, we reach a small clearing deep in the forest known as Raja Besar — the ‘Great King’.
Here we meet workers building a modest hut, using timber and metal beams carried along the same forest foot trail. Everyone is pitching in with the communal work, and even with the hubbub of grinding and hammering, this jungle scene is spectacularly beautiful. This is a clearing full of hope.
Within days, a large animal enclosure will be added and Tjing’s Jungle School will welcome a tiny sun bear cub named Mano. Her mother murdered by poachers, Mano was sold to wildlife traffickers whose planned shipment to the United Emirates was intercepted by Indonesian police and a rescue team from Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN). At four months old, weighing less than a domestic cat, Mano arrived at JAAN’s Sumatra Wildlife Centre in need of the sort of intensive, around-the-clock care that a mother usually provides.
Rescuing the Sun Bear: Mano’s Journey Back to the Wild
The level of commitment it takes to save a baby sun bear is utterly astounding: one full-time carer providing through-the-night bottle feeding, a constant supply of fresh, ripe fruit, twice daily walks, increasingly larger enclosures, veterinary check-ups and now, more than two years of jungle training by carers living with Mano in the forest.
At the end of this very long road, the Sumatra Wildlife Centre team must secure government permits to release Mano into the wild, in a national park large enough to protect one of the world’s rarest, most endangered, tortured and trafficked ‘pets’ from us — humans.
How Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN) Combats the Illegal Wildlife Trade
But this is what JAAN does best. A non-for-profit, non-governmental wildlife network with privately-funded rescue centres in Sumatra, Java and Bali, JAAN works with Indonesian police, government forestry officials, and its own highly-trained team of sniffer dogs to track, rescue, rehabilitate, and release an astonishing range of wild animal species from around the world.
On Kotok Island off the Javanese coast, the organisation cares for and releases sea eagles and other raptors; in West Bali, it’s veterinary team nurses injured sea turtles saved from the meat trade; while in Java, rescuers save long-tailed macaques — the so-called ‘dancing monkeys’ — from a tortured life on Indonesian streets, performing for cash at the hands of brutal captors.
All of this work is done on donations by a team committed to the unwavering JAAN co-founder Femke den Haas — a force of nature whose infectious enthusiasm, patience and ambition has gathered a bevy of animal activists to her side.
On the Frontlines of Indonesia’s Endangered Wildlife Crisis
Femke den Haas dangles the ultimate carrot: “You’ll be staying in the hut next to Mano” — and that’s how we meet our first ever sun bear, walking up the stairs to our temporary Sumatran home.
Built on gifted land on the outskirts of a small Indonesian village, on a known smuggling route for the world’s illegal wildlife trade, the Sumatra Wildlife Centre accepts every poached, injured and too-often tortured and rescued creature that reaches its gates.
Some have been rescued by JAAN’s own K9 team of specially trained wildlife sniffer dogs: crocodiles, sun bears, raptors and meerkats, endangered agile gibbons, macaques, civets, and leopard cats too. The aim is always to rehabilitate and release back into the wild, but for infants left without parents, those tortured in captivity, and exotic species trafficked from other countries through Indonesia, the journey back home can take years.
Inside the Operations at the Sumatra Wildlife Centre
From small beginnings, the centre has grown to include a veterinary clinic, a kitchen for preparing the animals’ meals, kennels for the sniffer dog team, and animal enclosures and compounds for every species. There are crocodile ponds and a meerkat playground, multi-storey enclosures for arboreal dwelling siamangs and lightning-fast agile gibbons, great netted pens for injured raptors, and sheltered nocturnal enclosures for a lonely slow loris, a singular civet, and a Sunda leopard cat, too.
Every day begins the same, preparing huge amounts of fresh food, much of it is harvested from the centre’s adjacent pesticide-free plantations. There are salads of fruit and vegetables for the omnivorous primates, corn cobs and seeds for parrots, live mice and meat for the wild cats, and fish for the crocodiles. They even throw in a few drinking coconuts for playful sun bears to tap into, and while the animals feed, every enclosure is thoroughly cleaned and filled with fresh vegetation and shade cover.
The staff work at a cracking pace, and in the space of our week-long stay, we watch new enclosures taking shape, including a huge compound for Mano and a soon-to-arrive sun bear cub named Henri that the staff hope to unite. Wildlife don’t always instantly make friends, but family groups and partnerships are essential for survival after release back into the wild.
Rehabilitating Abused Primates: Making a New Macaque Family
Common in Indonesia, long- and pig-tailed macaques have endearing humanlike qualities that makes the infants highly desirable as pets. It’s not until they outgrow their baby faces — and their cages — that captors begin to rethink their now problematic wild primates. This is when the Sumatran Wildlife Centre usually gets the call, rescuing and then attempting to meld hundreds of macaques each year into new family troops.
You might think that a macaque could be quickly released back into the wild, but here’s the process I didn’t expect. These highly sociable creatures that live in large troops in the wild, suffer considerable torment when separated from their mothers. As babies they need two-hourly milk feeds, and the bond of a human carer for many months. But moving forward, it takes three or four full years of growing up before an alpha male and an alpha female will emerge from the troop to lead and safeguard the entire group’s survival in the wild.
To be safely released back into a wild and large enough habitat with just the right food and little competition for it, requires extensive planning. For the centre’s endangered agile gibbons and solitary siamangs, home ranges must be extensive and free of human conflict, poaching and land clearing.
“They can never be safe from human impact in the forests,” SWC’s Head Veterinarian Janipa Saptayanti says.
Protecting the Endangered Gibbon Species of Sumatra
Janipa takes us to the centre’s far fringe where separate lofty enclosures house siamangs, leaf monkeys and lightning-fast agile gibbons. The siamang gibbons, known as owa, sing hauntingly to each other with bewitching calls that reach me late at night on the balcony of our hut.
The largest of all gibbons, these dark haired siamangs mate for life, living in small family groups in what are today rapidly disappearing forests, wiped out by clearing for palm oil plantations. Prized by wildlife traders who kill the defensive mothers and smuggle the infants out of Sumatra, baby siamang gibbons must then be milk-fed and cared for around the clock until they grow, thrive and can be paired with a compatible mate. The road to release is long, often lasting five years.
Of all the primates, sensitive leaf monkeys are the most difficult to raise. We meet Jani and Hamzah, one-year-old leaf monkeys confiscated as orphaned weeks-old infants, still with their fuzzy orange-coloured baby coats. Despite finding friendship together, a necessary step towards release, what the pair ultimately needs is ironic for sure: more rescued monkeys to arrive at the centre and help them form a large, firmly bonded troop.
Ellis Park Sanctuary: A Forever Home for Traumatized Animals
But not every rescue ends in release. Sometimes animals arrive so badly disabled, traumatised or reliant on their often heartless human captors that they can’t be released at all. We meet the gibbon Trinity, whose arm was cut off with a machete as she clung to her brutally murdered mother, and the pig-tailed macaque named Koja, whose spine grew bent thanks to spending more than twenty years in a tiny cat cage, or Brad, the crocodile that smashed all his teeth trying to bite his way out of a steel cage.
The SWC team realised early on that not every animal they cared for could be returned to the wild. In 2021, Australian musician Warren Ellis gifted them adjacent land and Ellis Park sanctuary became a safe forever home for the animals that could never leave. A public education centre was added, and the two centres — Ellis Park and Sumatra Wildlife Centre — are now run side-by-side to share the growing challenge of tackling wildlife mistreatment in Indonesia.
As I lie awake at night listening to our sun bear neighbour Mano cracking branches and playing at building a sleeping nest, and when I watch her on daily walks cracking coconuts and climbing fences in a single bound, I’m convinced that she will find her way back to the wilderness.
Small and distinctive thanks to the golden crest branded on their chest, wild sun bears are also very poorly studied. No one has a clue just how many remain in the wild but scientists estimate that population numbers plummet by at least 10 per cent with each passing year.
They are vulnerable and precious, each one worth saving. And with a team dedicated to her success, regardless of however long that might take, Mano has the best chance in the world of getting back to where she belongs.
How to Support JAAN and Ellis Park: Get Involved
JAAN (Jakarta Animal Aid Network) runs rescue centres and wildlife aid programs across Indonesia including a rescue and rehabilitation centre for raptors on Java’s Kotok Island and the West Bali Sea Turtle Clinic. The non-for-profit organisation has instigated the rescue and rehabilitation of more than 300 ex-dancing monkeys, forcing a country-wide ban in 2019, has freed and rehabilitated the last circus performing dolphins in Bali, and continues to rally for a dog meat-free Indonesia.
While the Sumatra Wildlife Centre is not open to the public, JAAN welcomes skilled volunteers across all its programs and centres, and encourages involvement, donations and website shop purchases to support its work.
Find out more and get involved at: jaanindonesia.org and ellispark.org.
A version of this article was first published by WellBeing magazine.
