TUARAN -- Two women zookeepers from England's Twycross Zoo are in Sabah preparing for a two-week stay to deepen their knowledge of the orang utans at the primates' Sepilok rehabilitation centre in Sandakan on Sabah's east coast.
Julie Wooley and Ratchell Sellers will leave for the centre, Wednesday under an exchange programme sponsored jointly by Sabah Wildlife Department and Sepilok Orang Utan Appeal UK, a British charitable organisation.
Wooley said she hoped to learn more about the nutrition and behaviour of the primates, and also looked forward to cuddling them.
"In Twycross, the orang utans live in an enclosed area and the baby orang utans are cared for by their own mothers but in Sepilok, the orang utan babies undergoing rehabilitation can be touched and cuddled by visitors," she told reporters at the Shangri-La Rasa Ria Resort Nature Reserve, here Tuesday.
The 25.6ha nature reserve was established by the resort in collaboration with the Wildlife Department in June 1996 to promote rehabilitation programmes for endangered species like the orang utan.
Sellers said she was interested to learn more about the orang utan because this species seemed to be more intelligent and special compared to other primates like chimpanzees which she took care of in Twycross.
Wooley and Sellers will be accompanied by a Sepilok Orang Utan Appeal primatologist Sheena Hynd who has spent six months in Sepilok studying the primates.
Her project is to establish whether any improvements can be made in the rehabilitation process of the orang utans in Sepilok and to determine how well rehabilitated orang utans cope in the wild after their release.
"It would take a long time to draw any result from the studies as one has to follow an orang utan to observe how it lives in the free jungle environment from dusk to dawn," she said, adding that not all orang utans liked to be followed or observed.
Courtesy of BERNAMA
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