Orangutans: Wizards of the Rain Forest

Praise for the previous edition:
"A fascinating firsthand account of the behavior and intelligence of orangutans, Russon's book is also an account of the successes, failures, and politics of orangutan rehabilitation in the forests of Borneo and Sumatra... The book is lavishly illustrated with full color photographs."
- Choice

The only great apes found in Asia, these arboreal wizards are by nature elusive and solitary, and inhabit nearly inaccessible tropical rainforests. The tragedy is that orangutans are almost extinct, surviving in the wild only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra where human influx is rapidly appropriating their habitat.

Based on fifteen years of research, this extraordinary and definitive book focuses on orangutan intelligence and behavior.

This book includes:

• A scientific history of orangutans
• Detailed descriptions of orangutans and their natural habitat
• Astonishing behavior patterns
• Rehabilitation operations at Camp Leakey and Wanariset
• The complex politics of orangutan rescue work
• Results of orangutans released back into the forest
• Updated resources
• What the future holds for these primates.

With one hundred color photographs taken by the author during her visits to the rainforests, Orangutans is an absorbing and instructive look at the unusual world of orangutans.

Almost thirteen years ago I set off for points east with the notion of studying orangutans in Borneo. That notion became a reality, one I found so fascinating that I have returned yearly ever since. As a psychologist I am concerned with how minds work, and my personal interest in orangutan minds was their intelligence. So I chose to study ex-captive orangutans under rehabilitation to forest life, in hopes that they would allow me the close-up look I needed to glimpse the workings of their intellect. I got that and more. The ex-captives allowed me an unusually intimate look at their species, one notorious for being elusive and keeping a distance. Primed to expect orangutans to be slow-moving dullards, at least compared to their quicksilver cousins the chimpanzees, I found instead that they are at least as sharp-witted as chimpanzees and they show it in many of the same ways -- imitating, using tools, planning, and deceiving, to name only a few. Spending time with them from day to day, from the sidelines, I also saw the richness of their lives -- work and play, squabbles and pleasures, plans, perplexities, mistakes, vexations, and successes. And eventually they showed me their original world, the rainforests of equatorial Borneo, and helped me learn something of that as well. I wrote this book for anyone interested in other intelligences, in our living relatives on earth, or in orangutans themselves--especially people who don't have the privilege encountering them as free-living beings. My hope is to convey my sense of who orangutans are, how they see the world, and what it's like to meet them equals, on their own terms as much as on ours. It is also to bring home the threats we humans pose to orangutans -- threats so severe that we are on the verge of sending them to extinction. It is only through recognizing the damage we inflict that we stand a chance of protecting them, and it is only through caring enough that we will make the effort to try.

Choice, October 2000 - T.C. Williams

Lavishly illustrated with full-color photographs ... The book is superbly produced and will be an important addition to most libraries.

Anne E. Russon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at York University in Toronto. She has been studying intelligence and learning in orangutans in Indonesian Borneo since 1989. She co-edited a book on great ape intelligence, Reading into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes.