Bornean Sun Bear Conservation

The Asian Wildlife Trade

Category: bear farming, conservation, poaching, threats
Date: February 5th 2010
By: Siew Te Wong

At a farm in Vietnam, bile is pumped from a sedated Asiatic black bear, violating national law. Thousands of wild bears have been captured to supply this traditional medicine.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/asian-wildlife/leong-photography

This is going to be a long piece to read…

Below I repost an article published in the January Issue of the National Geographic Magazine, The Asian Wildlife Trade http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/asian-wildlife/christy-text. It take me a while to decided to post it here because I think the world need to know about what is happening to wildlife that we all love and care for and how the local authority treated the people who jeopardized the wildlife that are belongs to no one but the nature itself.

For years, the main character of the article, the infamous wildlife trader and smuggler, Anson Wong, has been operating his illegal wildlife trade under the eyes of the Malaysian Wildlife Department also known as PERHILITAN. Although Anson has been prosecuted in US in 2001. His operation continue until today.

I felt angry after reading a news few days ago about his latest venture:

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/2/1/nation/5568465&sec=nation,

This is another madness that has to be stop at any cost. Only a hand full of key people is involved in this wildlife smuggling business but it involved thousands of wildlife being exploited each year. The author of this article, Bryan Christy has wrote about the operation and dirty business of Anson Wong in his book The Lizard King. You can read all the related news about Anson Wong at Bryan’s blogs where he did a great job on monitoring the development of this issue in detailed http://thelizardkingbook.com/ .

After you read the articles and the news http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/2/1/nation/5568465&sec=nation,

I encourage you to write to the local Malaysian newspapers Star – editor@thestar.com.my and NST – letters@nstp.com.my to express your concern over the issue. This wildlife trading simply cannot be continue. Anson’s business must be stop or all the wildlife in these regions will be jeopardized!

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http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/0…

The Kingpin

An exposé of the world’s most notorious wildlife dealer, his special government friend, and his ambitious new plan

By Bryan Christy

Photograph by Mark Leong

On September 14, 1998, a thin, bespectacled Malaysian named Wong Keng Liang walked off Japan Airlines Flight 12 at Mexico City International Airport. He was dressed in faded blue jeans, a light-blue jacket, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a white iguana head. George Morrison, lead agent for Special Operations, the elite, five-person undercover unit of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was there to greet him. Within seconds of his arrest, Anson (the name by which Wong is known to wildlife traffickers and wildlife law enforcement officers around the world) was whisked downstairs in handcuffs by Mexican federales, to be held in the country’s largest prison, the infamous Reclusorio Norte.

To Morrison and his team, Anson Wong was the catch of a lifetime—the world’s most wanted smuggler of endangered species. His arrest, involving authorities in Australia,Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States, was a hard-won victory, the culmination of a half-decade-long undercover operation still widely considered the most successful international wildlife investigation ever.

For too long in too many countries (including the U.S.), placing the word “wildlife” in front of the word “crime” had diminished its seriousness. U.S. federal prosecutors wanted Anson’s conviction to show the world that wildlife smugglers are criminals. In addition to charging him under the American wildlife-trafficking law known as the Lacey Act, they indicted him for conspiracy, felony smuggling, and money laundering.

For nearly two years Anson fought extradition to the U.S., but eventually he signed plea agreements, admitting to crimes carrying a maximum penalty of 250 years in prison and a $12.5-million fine. On June 7, 2001, U.S. District Judge Martin J. Jenkins sentenced him to 71 months in U.S. federal prison (with credit for 34 months served), fined him $60,000, and banned him from selling animals to anyone in the U.S. for three years after his prison release.

If the judge thought a ban on Anson Wong would work, he was mistaken. Shortly after his arrest, Anson’s wife and business partner, Cheah Bing Shee, established a new company, CBS Wildlife, which exported wildlife to the U.S. while Anson was in prison. His main company, Sungai Rusa Wildlife, continued to ship despite the ban. Now that he’s free, Anson has launched a new wildlife venture, a zoo that promises to be his most audacious enterprise yet.

Numbers Game

It is almost impossible to name an animal or plant species anywhere on the planet that has not been traded—legally or illegally—for its meat, fur, skin, song, or ornamental value, as a pet, or as an ingredient in perfume or medicine. Every year China, the U.S., Europe, and Japan purchase billions of dollars’ worth of wildlife from biologically rich parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, emptying out parks and plundering wildlands, often newly accessible along logging roads.

The path to market typically begins when poor hunters or farmers catch animals for local traders, who pass them up the supply chain, though some traffickers—Anson Wong among them—have even dispatched their own poachers, posing as tourists. In Asia, wildlife ends up on the banquet table or in medicine shops; in Western countries, in the living rooms of exotic-animal fanciers. The economics are as easy to understand as an art auction: the rarer the item, the higher the price. Around the globe, nature is dying, and the prices of her rarest works are going up.

While no one knows exactly how large the illegal wildlife trade is, this much is certain: It’s extraordinarily lucrative. Profit margins are the kind drug kingpins would kill for. Smugglers evade detection by hiding illegal wildlife in legal shipments, they bribe wildlife and customs officials, and they alter trade documents. Few are ever caught, and penalties are usually no more severe than a parking ticket. Wildlife trafficking may very well be the world’s most profitable form of illegal trade, bar none.

Smugglers also exploit a loophole in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). With 175 countries as members, CITES is the world’s primary treaty to protect wildlife, categorized into three groups according to how endangered a species is perceived to be. Appendix I animals, such as tigers and orangutans, are considered so close to extinction that their commercial trade is banned. Species in Appendix II are less vulnerable and may be traded under a permit system. Those in Appendix III are protected by the national legislation of the country that added them to the list. The CITES treaty has one gaping exception: Specimens bred in captivity do not receive the same protection as their wild counterparts. CITES, after all, applies to wild life.

Proponents of captive breeding argue that it takes pressure off wild populations, decreases crime, satisfies international demand that will never go away, and puts money in the pockets of those willing to commit to “farming” wildlife. But these benefits only hold in countries with enforcement policies strong enough to deter rule breakers. In practice, smugglers establish fake breeding facilities, then claim that animals and plants poached from the wild are captive bred. Fake captive breeding is just one of the techniques Anson Wong used in running a secret front operation for one of the world’s largest wildlife-smuggling syndicates.

Now the world’s most notorious convicted reptile trafficker is about to move in a new direction, with potentially shattering consequences for one of the most revered, charismatic—and endangered—animals on the planet: the tiger.

Operation Chameleon

Special Operations began its hunt for Anson Wong in the fall of 1993. Ops prided itself on tackling large-scale commercial traffickers. The group’s work on exotic-bird trafficking had resulted in the breakup of smuggling operations around the world—involving dozens of convictions in U.S. courts—and had contributed to passage of the Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992, which banned the import of many vulnerable bird species. Overnight, imports of macaws, African gray parrots, and other psittacines had dropped from hundreds of thousands a year to hundreds.

By the 1990s illegal reptiles were pouring into the U.S. Prices were skyrocketing—$20,000 or more for a rare tortoise or a Komodo dragon. Reptiles smuggle well: They’re small (at least as babies), durable, and with cold-blooded metabolisms, can go for long periods without food or water. Valuable and portable, reptiles were the diamonds of wildlife trafficking.

Informants had been raising Anson Wong’s name for years, and Ops suspected he was the global kingpin of the illegal reptile trade. Anson was already wanted in the U.S. for smuggling rare reptiles to a Florida dealer in the late 1980s. He was said to be acutely aware of his status as an outlaw. There would be no “stinging” Anson Wong, no tricking him with a onetime transaction in a hotel room or catching him personally bringing reptiles through an airport. To get him, Ops would have to come up with something clever.

Special Agent Morrison—six foot five, a lifelong hunter, the son of a lawyer—was given the lead. He and his boss, Special Agent Rick Leach, leased a unit in a business complex outside San Francisco, not far from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the nuclear weapons facility. They filled their new wholesale enterprise, called Pac Rim, with the only saleable merchandise they had, a truckload of seashells and corals left over from previous investigations: fluted clamshells, spiraling Trochidae shells, hard corals, the sort of white and pink junk sold by aquarium supply stores and beachside tourist shops. They advertised their confidence items in magazines, and when legitimate orders came in, the seasoned crime fighters boxed and labeled seashell orders themselves.

As a complement to Pac Rim, Ops opened a retail business called Silver State Exotics outside Reno, Nevada. The combination gave the agents a circle of economic life—they could import animals in wholesale quantities through Pac Rim and retail what they didn’t need for evidence through Silver State Exotics, giving Pac Rim the appearance of a thriving global operation (and an income).

On October 19, 1995, Morrison sent a fax to Anson’s company, Sungai Rusa Wildlife, explaining that he was a wholesaler of shells and corals interested in expanding into reptiles and amphibians. Anson replied with a one-page price list offering low-end frogs and toads for under five dollars and house geckos for 30 cents (items known in the pet industry as trash animals), listed by their Latin names. In one case Anson used his own name for a subspecies: ansoni. Two animals on the list stood out—the Fly River turtle (also known as the pig-nosed turtle) and the frilled lizard, protected throughout their ranges in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Australia. So in his first contact with Morrison, a complete stranger, Anson had offered a taste of illegal wildlife.

Soon Anson was soliciting Morrison with the planet’s scarcest, most valuable Appendix I reptiles: Komodo dragons from Indonesia, tuatara from New Zealand, Chinese alligators, and Madagascan plowshare tortoises, rarest of the rare. Using a corrupt employee in the FedEx facility in Phoenix, Arizona, Anson express mailed protected species—including a Southeast Asian false gharial and Madagascan radiated tortoises, both Appendix I—to fake “drop” addresses. He flew Komodos directly to Morrison from Malaysia, hidden in suitcases wheeled by his American mule, James Burroughs. He sent Madagascan radiated tortoises, their legs taped inside their shells, bundled in black socks and packed at the bottom of legal reptile shipments.

Morrison marveled at Anson’s dexterity. He could broker turtles out of Peru without ever touching them. He contracted out poaching hits on a wildlife sanctuary in New Zealand. He owned a wildlife business in Vietnam. And he boasted an ability to enforce his deals using Chinese muscle.

Significantly, he exploited the CITES captive-breeding exception, claiming that wild animals he exported were captive bred. Under one ruse, Anson shipped large numbers of Indian star tortoises through Dubai, claiming they’d been bred in captivity there. When investigators checked on the facility, they found a flower shop.

Anson assured Morrison that they had nothing to fear from Malaysian authorities. Wildlife smuggling in Malaysia is policed both by customs and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, or Perhilitan. Referring to his American courier, Anson told Morrison, “I have the second man of the customs bring him out of the airport and drive him to my office.”

In one instance Anson offered Morrison 20 Timor pythons for $15,000. Morrison said he was interested but worried that the snakes would lack CITES paperwork. “They’ll definitely be coming with papers,” Anson said. “I will have a fall guy and he will get arrested. Plus the goods will be confiscated, and the goods will be sold to me by the department.”

Then Anson offered Morrison horns of Sumatran and Javanese rhinoceroses, both forbidden Appendix I animals. He talked openly about getting shahtoosh, the “king of wool,” from the Tibetan antelope. He had access to extraordinary birds, including the Rothschild’s mynah, whose wild population was estimated to number fewer than 150. He bragged about his Spix’s macaws, a bird now believed to be extinct in the wild, claiming he’d recently sold three. The black market rate for a Spix’s macaw was $100,000. His expanding list of astonishing illegal rarities included panda skins and snow leopard pelts.

Perceiving Anson Wong as only a reptile smuggler had been a terrible mistake, allowing him to maneuver freely across the globe. Reptiles were repulsive, repulsive was invisible, invisible was money. If Anson could deliver on his offers, cheap, legal reptiles shipped to pet stores around the world were a front for a vast, illegal wildlife-smuggling empire.

“I can get anything here from anywhere,” he wrote Morrison. “It only depends on how much certain people get paid. Tell me what you want, I will weigh the risks, and tell you how much it’ll set you back.

“Nothing can be done to me,” he boasted. “I could sell a panda—and, nothing. As long as I’m here, I’m safe.”

Finally, after five years and half a million dollars’ worth of illegal trade, Morrison was ready to breach Fortress Malaysia, as he called Anson’s base. He proposed that Anson partner with him in a new venture, a kind of Endangered Species, Inc., specializing in the rarest animals on the planet. “Top dollar, hard-to-find things,” Anson responded. “I’ve put myself in that position where people will offer me things first before they go elsewhere.” He was in.

Morrison suggested they start out by smuggling bear bile, an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine. Anson agreed that there was high demand for bear bile in China and South Korea, and he said he had a client willing to pay up to a hundred dollars an ounce for the liquid. “Please remember,” he wrote Morrison, “I am not selling direct—too dangerous.” Instead, he would use a middleman.

Morrison said he too had a partner, who could arrange for the bile from Canada, but she wouldn’t work with Anson until she met him in person. Anson was reluctant. Because of the outstanding warrant on him, he couldn’t enter U.S. territory, he told Morrison, and he was leery of Canada.

“We can meet anywhere here in Asia,” Anson wrote. Argentina, South Africa, Peru, France, and England were all OK too. “No New Zealand,” he stipulated, “or Australia.”

They settled on Mexico.

The Malaysian Phoenix

With Anson Wong’s arrest that September day in 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service accomplished its mission, but it may have lost a war. “We focused everything on one climax,” George Morrison told me. Exhausted, he left full-time undercover work. Rick Leach, the group’s supervisor, retired, and soon Special Operations had all but shut its doors.

Five years later, on November 10, 2003, Anson went free. Reporters flocked to Malaysia. They parked in front of his headquarters on Penang, a tiny island off the west coast, and tried to take his photograph. He refused to speak to the press.

At the time, Malaysia was embroiled in a smuggling scandal involving western lowland gorillas, a critically endangered species. Traffickers had used Nigeria’s University of Ibadan Zoological Gardens as a front to smuggle four infants, snatched from the forest in Cameroon, to Malaysia’s Taiping Zoo. The Taiping Four incident had sparked international outrage. In the midst of this commotion, Anson sat down at his computer and typed a one-line message on Vorras.net, a commercial message board frequented by international wildlife traders: “we need Nigerian primates. pls quote CnF Malaysia.”

Anson was back in business.

In truth he had never really stopped. During his imprisonment, Cheah Bing Shee continued to run the operation. Now Anson began to frequent Internet message boards, seeking reptiles from India, Madagascar, and Sudan; insects from Mozambique; and “10 tons a month” of sheep horns. He has offered to sell an array of wildlife, including Malaysian reptiles, mynah birds, parrots, and half a million dollars’ worth of wild agarwood, prized for its aromatic qualities. To a request for dead birds and mammals, he replied, “We have always specimens.”

Since his release he’s had only one brush with the law. On March 16, 2006, Manny Esguerra, an alert Thai Airways cargo employee stationed in Manila, questioned a shipment of reptiles en route from the Philippines to Sungai Rusa Wildlife in Malaysia. The consignment lacked export permits, in violation of Philippine law. Esguerra, as required by his airline, telephoned the intended recipient, which confirmed the shipment. Esguerra referred the case to Philippine authorities. Then the Philippine supplier named in the shipping records evaporated. The seized reptiles themselves vanished before authorities had a chance to investigate further, turning up later at a remote Philippine rescue center. Local news articles presented the case as a success, but no one was arrested. The only identifiable person who could be connected to the illegal shipment was safe in Fortress Malaysia—Anson Wong.

What initially drew my attention to Anson was an offhand comment by Mike Van Nostrand, owner of Strictly Reptiles in South Florida, among the world’s largest reptile import-export wholesalers and one of Anson’s biggest customers. I was writing a book about Van Nostrand’s past as a reptile smuggler. “Two weeks after he got out,” Van Nostrand told me in the summer of 2004, “Anson offered me something he really shouldn’t have.” It was a Gray’s monitor, a fruit-eating Philippine lizard thought to have been extinct until the late 1970s and one of the animals Anson had gone to prison for smuggling. Van Nostrand, who had done jail time himself for smuggling reptiles and wanted to avoid a repeat, was shocked. “Boy, you never quit,” he replied.

In September 2006 I rented an apartment in South Florida and went to work for Strictly Reptiles. I spent three months in the warehouse sweeping floors, cleaning snake cages, and unpacking reptile shipments—including ones from Anson—working toward a single question for Van Nostrand: “Would you introduce me?” Employees repeatedly accused me of being a federal agent. They photographed me. They wrote down my license plate number. I was threatened with a baseball bat and had a .357 aimed at my head. But eventually Van Nostrand and I became friends. A few days before my lease ran out, I asked my question. “Sure,” he answered. “Anson’ll talk to you. He loves to talk about himself.”

Inside the Fortress

Situated in the trendy Pulau Tikus (”rat island”) section of Penang, Sungai Rusa Wildlife might easily be mistaken for a hair salon. No wider than a family garage and unidentified, it’s one of dozens of units along a quiet strip of retail shops offering tummy reduction, skin care, and spa treatments. When I walked in on March 2, 2007, a black BMW and a windowless delivery van bearing the address of Anson’s Penang-based reptile farm were parked out front. Next door was Xie Design, an interior furnishings business Anson’s wife operates.

Anson shook my hand with that significant extra squeeze some men give you just before the release. He led me past stacks of live tarantulas in deli cups, scattered paperwork, and shipping boxes to his private office, a cramped, windowless room. Although he’d advertised his company on the Web as doing “U.S. $50 million to U.S. $100 million” in annual sales, the fanciest item in the room was the cell phone on his desk.

After I sat down, Anson pointed to three sets of photographs laminated in plastic and taped to his office door. “My wife put those up to remind me to ask myself if it was worth it,” he said. “Beautiful, huh?”

They were evidence photos of Indian star tortoises he’d smuggled, each page stamped by the Northern District of California federal court. They may have been a reminder to Anson from his wife, but they were also a warning to every person who stepped through his door: I, Anson Wong, have run the toughest legal gantlet in the world, and I am here.

He was deceptively boyish-looking. He wore large, round glasses and had a ponytail, which was flecked with gray. At 49, his face was without stress. He had the cultured air of a successful artist, a sculptor maybe, and he spoke with a pleasant British curl to his perfect English. Behind his head was a map of the world. Behind me slept a reticulated python, the world’s longest python.

Anson said he’d started in the wildlife trade in the 1980s, with a company called Exotic Skins and Alives. Back then, he said, Malaysia gave legal protection only to indigenous wildlife, so he traded freely in endangered species from around the world. Anson smiled. “Anything,” he said.

I said I was writing a book about his U.S. customer Mike Van Nostrand, who had also played a cat-and-mouse game with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “You’re the main guy in Asia,” I said. “Mike told me that if it wasn’t for Anson Wong, there would be no reptile industry in the United States.”

Anson named a rival trader in Indonesia and another in Madagascar. Then he laughed and shook his head. “Well, I guess there aren’t that many of us.”

Wildlife is an integral part of every Asian economy, I said, and I’m interested in the line between man and nature.

“Ahhh,” he said. Anson raised his arms and put his fists together. “Always in conflict.”

Future Shock

“I’m building another zoo,” he said, pointing to a 30-page document on his desk titled “Anson Wong, Flora and Fauna Village.” “The plans were approved yesterday.” I began thumbing through the architectural drawings.

Anson’s partners were his wife and Michael Ooi, an internationally renowned orchid dealer. (Michael’s brother Gino operates Malaysia’s largest rare bird facility, Penang Bird Park.) For years the Wongs and Michael Ooi had run a zoo on Penang called Bukit Jambul Orchid, Hibiscus and Reptile Garden.

Zoos make good cover. Smugglers in control of a zoo can move endangered species with CITES paperwork, and a zoo can use its breeding program to explain the appearance of a new animal. CITES generally doesn’t monitor what happens to an animal after a zoo imports it: A gorilla can be sold domestically, or if it dies (or is killed), can be cut up for meat, or parts, or even stuffed. Anson’s portion of the zoo was called Bukit Jambul Reptile Sanctuary, and it had enabled him to host nature lovers and wildlife experts from around the world while he secretly smuggled rare animals through his other company.

Anson told me his new zoo would far surpass Bukit Jambul. He would still display reptiles, and he would charge visitors next to nothing to get in, but this time he expected to make a lot of money. He had a new focus: big cats. “I love tigers,” he said.

“Captive breeding,” Anson smiled, “that is the future.”

I looked up with an adrenaline jolt. Tigers are all but extinct in the wild, with only about 4,000 left. Now Anson Wong was planning to make tigers his specialty.

There’s a valuable black market for tigers. Tibetans wear tiger-skin robes; wealthy collectors display their heads; exotic restaurants sell their meat; their penis is said to be an aphrodisiac; and Chinese covet their bones for health cures, including tiger-bone wine, the “chicken soup” of Chinese medicine. Experts have put the black market value of a dead, adult male tiger at $10,000 or more. In some Asian countries, tourist attractions called tiger parks secretly operate as front operations for tiger farming—butchering captive tigers for their parts and offering a potential market for wild-tiger poachers too. (Keeping an adult tiger costs $5,000 a year in food alone, but a bullet costs only a dollar.)

Anson has a dark history with big cats. During Operation Chameleon he had asked Morrison’s help to have tigers he was raising mounted for sale as trophies. He has offered to smuggle a cougar out of the U.S., and he wanted to sell Morrison an Appendix I marbled cat. After his prison release, tiger cubs he owned were found on display at a Kuala Lumpur pet store. Anson was practiced at circumventing Malaysian prohibitions on keeping tigers and other endangered species by securing “special permits”—licenses granted on the recommendation of Perhilitan, the wildlife department, to private individuals, theme parks, and zoos.

He glanced at my shoulder bag. “George Morrison recorded everything,” he said, and stood up. He rapped his knuckles against his wall calendar. “I’m busy,” he said, indicating forthcoming commitments: Taipei, Hong Kong, Thailand.

“I’m here this weekend,” I offered.

“Weekends are for family,” he replied. “We’ll talk, but not this trip.”

He walked me to the door. “When you’re done with your book, we should talk about my story,” he said.

That’s when I made a mistake. I told him I’d written an article exposing a questionable agreement between the U.S. government and a British coin dealer to sell the world’s most valuable—and stolen—coin and split the profit. Normally, telling an ex-felon you’d given the government a black eye was a sure bet to improve your relationship. But momentarily I’d forgotten the premise for Operation Chameleon: Anson and his government were friends.

Anson stared at me. “So, you’re a journalist,” he said, stiffening.

Apparently, he had mistaken me for a biographer. I started to reply, but he interrupted. “Journalists who uncover what people want left alone can get killed,” he said, his voice very calm.

Kecik-kecik Cili Padi

One day in late December 2007, Anson’s black Mercedes-Benz pulled into Penang International Airport and picked up two of Malaysia’s top wildlife enforcement officials, Perhilitan’s law enforcement division director, Sivananthan Elagupillay, and his boss, Deputy Director General Misliah Mohamad Basir. The officers had flown in from Kuala Lumpur for a press conference launching Flora and Fauna Village, now a joint venture between Penang’s forestry department and Anson Wong and Michael Ooi’s enterprise. It would be a five-acre zoo carved out of the Teluk Bahang Forest Reserve, and to help finance it, the Penang state government was contributing 700,000 ringgit (U.S. $200,000). A photograph in Malaysia’s newspaper The Star showed government officials inspecting the zoo’s new tiger den.

“The price will be very affordable as our aim of setting the village is also to help conserve the endangered species,” Ooi told reporters.

Anson had long boasted his government influence. Now he had the open support of both the Penang government and Malaysia’s wildlife department. Misliah’s presence was ironic. During Operation Chameleon Misliah had been the wildlife official in charge on Penang. She signed his CITES permits. Within four years of Anson’s arrest, she was promoted to director of Perhilitan’s law enforcement division, and by 2007 she’d been given the department’s number two job.

I wondered what Misliah thought of the man who had smuggled so much endangered wildlife right under her nose.

“He is my good friend,” Misliah giggled, sitting behind her desk in her spacious office at Perhilitan headquarters. She was a plump little woman, hardly more than a round head wrapped in a Muslim’s white tudung scarf. She was swaddled in a sky blue shawl over a baju kurung, a long blouse and sarong, and wore petite brown sandals. Her voice was honestly the sweetest I’d ever heard.

I’d been warned that Misliah had two prejudices: She disliked Americans, and she thought all Americans were obsessed with Anson Wong.

“You know,” I said, “I’m an American. And when it comes to Malaysia and wildlife, all we ever hear about in the U.S. is one story.”

“What is that?” she asked pleasantly.

I smiled. “Anson Wong.”

Misliah giggled. She had joined Perhilitan in the early 1980s, about the same time Anson started in the reptile business, and had been posted to Penang for much of her career. “I spent more than ten years inspecting his shipments,” she said. I tried to picture Misliah, crowbar in hand, prying open Anson’s wooden shipping crates, reaching into boxes crammed with biting Tokay geckos, venomous mangrove snakes, and other discouragingly aggressive animals Anson called cover species, because he put them on top of illegal animal shipments.

She hadn’t known much about reptiles when she started, she said, but now she did. “Everything I know about them I learned from opening Anson’s boxes.” Misliah turned to look at her bookshelves. Though she hadn’t seen him much since her move to Kuala Lumpur, she still borrowed Anson’s books on bird identification from time to time. When her officers can’t identify an animal, she tells her people to call Anson. “He’s better than anyone in the department at identifying wildlife, so why not go to him,” she said. “He’s the most knowledgeable in the country.”

I noticed that Misliah rarely blinks.

“He is very smart,” she continued, explaining that Anson does all his deals over the phone. “In Malaysia you must catch someone with the animals. Not like the U.S. with the Lacey Act,” she said contemptuously.

The Lacey Act makes it a federal crime to violate wildlife laws, even those of a foreign country, and a wildlife smuggler doesn’t have to be caught in possession of an animal to face felony prosecution. Misliah considers Anson’s conviction under the Lacey Act illegitimate and has publicly accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of framing him.

“They said he had Komodos, but he never handles animals himself—he has runners everywhere,” Misliah said. “When he was in prison, Anson wrote me letters. He bribed his way. They treated him like a king!” She explained that his business had gone down while he was in prison and his wife was in charge. “But,” she said, “now it is going up.”

Malaysia’s second highest wildlife law enforcement officer speaks of her country’s most notorious illegal trafficker like a doting aunt.

“People say, ‘How can you give him his license?’?” A smile wreathed Misliah’s face. “He was a very bad boy, but if we don’t give him a license, he would just do it anyway.” This way, she said, they could keep their eye on him.

To this day Misliah vouches for Anson. “Anson Wong has carried out his business legally and complying [sic] the needs and requirements under the domestic law. He and his business in peninsular Malaysia have been monitored closely by this department,” her office asserted in a written statement to the press in 2008.

She was also in favor of legalized tiger and bear-bile farming. “Why not?” she asked me.

Misliah Mohamad Basir, so inconspicuous, seemingly so benign, is one of the most powerful wildlife decision-makers on the planet. On her watch Malaysia has become a global trafficking hub.

I kept coming back to how delightful she seemed in person. “Isn’t Misliah the sweetest little woman you ever met?” I asked a senior Perhilitan officer.

The officer studied me for a moment, then smiled. “In Perhilitan we have a saying about her: Kecik-kecik cili padi.”

A park ranger standing nearby nodded.

“The smallest chilies are always the hottest.”

Sheriff Wanted

Misliah had mentioned an adversary named Chris Shepherd, an intrepid investigator who has drawn attention to black market wildlife operations throughout Southeast Asia. “He says we’re just a transit country,” Misliah told me, with obvious disdain. “He says we do nothing to stop smuggling.”

Shepherd, a Canadian, works for TRAFFIC, the trade-monitoring arm of the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Based in Cambridge, England, with offices around the world, TRAFFIC’s investigators monitor crime and pass what they learn to host country law enforcement agencies. Shepherd is the lead investigator in the Southeast Asia headquarters, in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Over the past decade he’s published a mountain of reports covering illegal trade in bear parts, elephants, civets, Indonesia’s laughing thrushes, the Indian star tortoise, the serow, the Roti Island snake-necked turtle, the Sumatran tiger, and more. He is widely considered among the region’s best investigators, and his reports benefit conservationists and law enforcement around the world.

When I visited Shepherd and asked if he would show me his Anson Wong file, he looked at me blankly. He opened a file cabinet and removed a thin folder from a half-empty drawer. After scanning a few pages, he shook his head.

Not one NGO investigator I met in Southeast Asia, Shepherd included, had ever laid eyes on Anson Wong. Time and again I found experts eager to take me to see atrocities: bear cubs in Vietnam dipped in boiling water to intensify the “life force” in bear-paw soup, orangutans chained in the backyards of Indonesian generals, endangered birds openly for sale in Asian markets. But when I asked what connections could be made between a scene and a criminal organization, no one had a single example of a syndicate being mapped out the way one would expect to see on any low-budget cop show.

“Their brains all work like a camera,” George Morrison told me. NGOs, their donors, and the media tend to focus on wildlife crimes they can see, while multinational criminal syndicates operate hidden behind thickets of corporate records, CITES permits, and trade data.

NGO staff have many demands on their time: fund-raising and species reports, press interviews, market surveys, donor meetings, and bill paying. NGOs are not police. They have no enforcement authority, their employees depend for their visas on the wildlife officials they might investigate, and if NGOs push too hard, they invite trouble. In 2008, TRAFFIC issued a report on the Sumatran trade in tiger parts and urged Indonesia to increase its enforcement. In response, Indonesia froze TRAFFIC’s activities, a move tantamount to expulsion. Tonny Soehartono, the Ministry of Forestry official responsible for Indonesia’s action, explained his reasoning: “TRAFFIC attacked my country.”

TRAFFIC itself has just three investigators covering Southeast Asia and only a hundred staff worldwide. The CITES secretariat employs only one—that’s right, one—enforcement officer. Interpol likewise employs one person to manage its wildlife-crime program. Other countries have useful tools, such as wiretap authority, but they don’t have the long reach of the Lacey Act, and now U.S. Special Operations has dwindled to three or fewer agents.

At a U.S. congressional committee hearing on the links between national security and wildlife trafficking, I met a woman with a Ph.D. in veterinary science who had helped prepare some of the informational material. “I want to go work undercover in Southeast Asia,” she told me. I was impressed: a bright young professional eager to take on the undercover agent’s life. “I have some vacation time coming up,” she said, “and I’m going to do it.”

Is there any other area of law enforcement where a private citizen could even imagine doing undercover work on her vacation?

Misliah dislikes Shepherd because his criticisms appear in the news, but cases do well in the press only if they involve iconic animals that garner catchy names like Taiping Four or Bangkok Six (smuggled orangutans). They don’t do well if they’re the simple fish called humphead wrasse, or the 14 tons of turtles, monitor lizards, and pangolins found floating in a deserted boat off the coast of China.

One cause for hope may be a new regional organization—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN). Established four years ago, ASEAN-WEN brings together customs agents, wildlife officers, prosecutors, and police from each of its ten member countries. Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. are also involved, with much of ASEAN-WEN’s funding provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It’s a testament to ASEAN-WEN’s potential that Anson Wong subscribes to its newsletter.

Last August Misliah responded to allegations of a corrupt relationship between her department and Anson Wong: “As far as Malaysia is concerned, he abides by local laws and has the necessary licenses,” she said. “What he does outside the country is not our concern.”

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Sabah ecotourism company supports sun bear conservation

Category: BSBCC, Fund raising
Date: February 3rd 2010
By: Siew Te Wong

SunBear-E-News

BSBCC is happy to report that a donation of RM1,200 (USD 350) has just been received from Tabin Wildlife Holidays Sdn Bhd, a local ecotourism company which runs the Tabin Wildlife Resort in southeast Sabah. This resort is located on the edge of Sabah’s largest wildlife reserve, the 1,200 sq km Tabin Wildlife Reserve, home of Bornean pygmy elephants, clouded leopards and yes, sun bears.

The money was raised through a donation of RM100 being made for each 3 day-2 night Tabin tour programme purchased between October and December 2009.(See our blog dated 5^th October 2009). On top of that, each buyer received a sun bear plush toy in return for their good deed. The initiative was advertised by Tourism Malaysia, in the local newspapers, in Tabin Wildlife Holiday’s newsletter and in an attractive poster, all helping to raise awareness of sun bears and their conservation.

This is a great example of a local company stepping up to support the conservation of wildlife in Sabah and we hope that other companies will follow suit.

Thank you Tabin Wildlife Holidays!

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It all started with an email…

Category: BSBCC, Volunteers, education
Date: January 31st 2010
By: Siew Te Wong

Back in April 20^th 2009, I received an email from Dr. Audrey Low, a Malaysian lecturer and educator based in Australia. Like many others who contacted me out of the blue, she had been following my blog about the works we done in BSBCC for some time. From her sincere email, she offered her help as a Borneo specialist, anthropologist, and nature lover, etc., anything that I can think of, as long as she can help. She also mentioned her Australian hubby, Howard Jackson, is a filmmaker who also teaches film production in university.

“Uhmmm…, filmmaker.. Borneo specialist…sun bear.. the least known bear in the world… “

It did not take a long time to figure out what they can help me and the sun bear.

Remember in my old blog about how can you help us? I mentioned: “do what you do best to help us!” Among a long list of things where people can do to help, “…if you are a film maker, make a film about sun bear and help us tell the world about their stories and plights“

So, after almost a year of emailing, and skyping between north and south hemisphere, Audrey and Howard will be coming to Sabah on April to help us produce a video about sun bear and our work at BSBCC to help sun bears.

You can read more about Howard and Audrey in their blogs at:

http://papayatreelimited.blogspot.com

http://wildhoopproductions.blogspot.com/

Thank you Audrey and Howard, BSBCC welcome you and thank you for your help!

We all (including the sun bears) are looking foward to meet you!

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Re-read Borneo’s Moment of Truth

Category: Uncategorized
Date: January 28th 2010
By: Siew Te Wong

This is a year old article published in National Geographic magazine.

Tonight I re-read it gain. I think we all should do the same again. ….

Because “.. we need to do it while there’s still something left to protect.”

————————————————————–

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2008/11/borneo/white-text

http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org/2008/10/30/borneos-moment-of-truth/

Borneo’s Moment of Truth Published: November 2008

The majestic forests are vanishing in smoke and sawdust, but there’s still hope for the island’s fabled biodiversity—if the palm oil rush can be slowed.

By Mel White

First, I will tell you about the Borneo of your dreams.

The day starts well before dawn with the lunatic hooting of gibbons, the rain forest’s alarm clock, lovers and rivals wooing and warning each other from the treetops in an urgent ape language that I, their terrestrial relative, can only guess at.

From my camp a creekside trail leads into forest past trees whose massive trunks rise a hundred feet to the lowest branches. As sunlight makes its feeble way through the dense green canopy, another primate, a long-tailed macaque, walks along the stream below, hoping for a breakfast of fish or frog. Whether it’s successful or not, its expression of perpetual irritation will never change. No sooner has the monkey disappeared upstream than a pair of short-tailed mongooses bound down to the bank, seemingly more intent on fun than food.

At a clearing, a pair of rhinoceros hornbills fly to a fruiting tree on loud-whooshing wings and begin to feed. Mostly black, nearly the size of turkeys, they have huge red-and-yellow casques on their bills that gleam in the sun like polished lacquer. The birds outshine everything else in the forest until a hand-size shape flits erratically past at waist level, deep velvety black, but also crimson and electric green, screaming neon green, a color as gaudy as the name of this creature: Rajah Brooke’s birdwing. At almost seven inches across, it’s one of the largest butterflies in the world. If the rhinoceros hornbill doesn’t take your breath away—if the Rajah Brooke’s birdwing doesn’t—have someone hold your wrist and check for a pulse.

Later I take a small boat down a broad river called the Kinabatangan, then up a side channel as narrow as an alleyway. A troop of proboscis monkeys climb through the branches overhead, where they will spend the night in tall trees beside the water. The potbellied male, ridiculously outsize nose hanging from his face like a ripe fruit, is so ugly he’s endearing, in a kind of bibulous-old-uncle way. Most of the pointy-nosed females under his watch cradle young at their breasts. Silvered leaf monkeys look down from above, and a bearded pig stands just inside the forest to watch us pass. As the boat drifts below an overhanging branch, a four-foot-long water monitor lizard drops into the water.

A Borneo pygmy elephant enters the river and swims in front of the boat, blowing like a whale. “Pygmy” it may be in comparison to other elephants, but when it emerges dark and shining on the opposite bank, it’s as if an island is rising from the sea. I see where it’s going: A herd of around 30 animals—a long-tusked bull, many adult females, and various young—munch tangled vines beside the main river, expressionless as statues and only marginally more animated.

This is the mythic Borneo, the island of the world’s imagination, and it’s all as wondrous as it sounds. But if you want to see the real Borneo, the Borneo of the first decade of the 21st century, it would be good to be the crested serpent-eagle perched in a tree across the river. Then you could soar high above the Kinabatangan and see how quickly the unruly forest gives way to neatly planted rows of oil palm trees, stretching for mile after mile in all directions. The palm plantation is lush and green, and the arching fronds of the trees give it an exotic beauty, and for the incomparable biodiversity of Borneo it is inexorable death.

Set between the South China and Java Seas, bisected by the Equator, the island of Borneo has served throughout human history mostly to have its natural resources exploited—many would say plundered—by a succession of peoples from around the world.

Chinese traders came for rhinoceros horn, the aromatic wood called gaharu, and birds’ nests for soup. Later, Muslim and Portuguese traders joined them to export pepper and gold. Britain and the Netherlands controlled the island during the colonial period of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when loggers began cutting the tropical hardwood forest covering the island. The current political division of Borneo—the southern three-quarters belongs to Indonesia, most of the rest to Malaysia, with slivers that make up Brunei—reflects alliances of the British and Dutch colonial era, which ended with independence after World War II.

In recent decades, companies from Europe, the United States, and Australia have drilled for abundant oil and natural gas and strip-mined coal. There are mansions from Amsterdam to Melbourne, from Singapore to Houston, that were built with wealth from Borneo. Mansions built with Borneo wealth stand in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, too, because Indonesia and Malaysia, or at least the political and economic elite, have been the biggest plunderers of all.

A different kind of richness has attracted others, including the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent time here in the mid-1850s while he developed theories important to modern understanding of evolution and biogeography. Wallace collected more than a thousand species new to science, including Rajah Brooke’s birdwing. Scientists have continued making discoveries ever since, demonstrating that the rain forest of Borneo ranks with the most biologically diverse places on Earth.

Borneo has more than 15,000 known species of plants, including more than 2,500 species of orchids. Southeast Asia’s lowland forests, including Borneo’s, are the tallest tropical rain forests in the world, and may have as many as 240 species of trees on a single four-acre site. Borneo is home to the world’s largest flower, the world’s largest orchid, the world’s largest carnivorous plants, and the world’s largest moth. In the multilevel structure of Borneo’s rain forest lives the world’s largest collection of gliding animals: Apart from several species of flying squirrels there are flying lizards, flying colugos, flying frogs, and—the stuff of nightmares for some—flying snakes.

Sun bears and clouded leopards roam Borneo’s forests, while two species of gibbons and eight species of monkeys climb in the trees. Around a thousand elephants have survived in one corner of the island—mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah, where the Kinabatangan River runs to the Sulu Sea. Rhinoceroses barely hang on to existence, with fewer than four dozen remaining. But it’s an even more charismatic animal—the orangutan—that has become the symbol of Borneo. Its expressive eyes stare out from the newsletters and funding appeals of conservation groups around the world. Considering the island’s unsurpassed biodiversity—from orangutans and rhinoceroses to tiny mosses and beetles not yet discovered—and the rate at which its forests are being lost, Borneo’s future may well be the most critical conservation issue on our planet.

From a satellite perspective, the threat of Borneo’s imminent deforestation might seem overstated. The island, slightly larger than Texas, is still half covered with trees, and in the interior highlands stand hundreds of square miles of virgin forests where almost no one goes save indigenous hunters, wildlife poachers, and gaharu gatherers. Reaching some areas requires a boat trip of several days or strenuous hikes through pathless wilderness.

But it’s an entirely different story, and an increasingly desperate one, for lowland forests, the prime habitat for most of Borneo’s wealth of biodiversity, including orangutans and elephants. During the past two decades, an estimated two million acres were cleared annually, an area more than half the size of Connecticut. A paper in Science magazine in 2001—ominously titled “The End for Indonesia’s Lowland Forests?”—warned of the “dire consequences” of “the current state of resource anarchy” and cited a study predicting that lowland forests in Indonesian Borneo could be totally destroyed by 2010. While government crackdowns have slowed illegal logging and exports, the result has simply been to delay the forecast doomsday.

Other factors could speed it up again. In the past 20 years vast, single-crop plantations of oil palm have spread across Borneo to meet the demand for the versatile (and vastly profitable) oil derived from its fruit. Palm oil is used for cooking, and in cosmetics, soap, desserts, and a seemingly endless list of other products, including biofuel. Indonesia and Malaysia provide 86 percent of the world’s supply; growing conditions are perfect on Borneo for this green gold. Even as conservationists spread the news about palm oil’s contribution to global deforestation—some calling for boycotting of palm oil products—Indonesia has become the world’s number one producing country, with 15 million acres under cultivation, a figure that may double by 2020.

As if the oil palm monoculture weren’t enough, Borneo possesses another resource that combines economic blessing and environmental danger: The 300-million-year-old plant material that once grew on what is now Borneo lies underground, transformed into coal. Surface mines—for gold as well as coal—spread across southern and eastern Borneo like pockmarks, displacing forest and polluting rivers with waste.

And in a world newly awakened to the dangers of climate change, Borneo has gained global attention for yet another reason: A specialized ecosystem called peat swamp forest covers around 11 percent of the island. Here, trees grow on highly organic soil built of centuries’ accumulation of waterlogged plant material. Sometimes reaching a depth of 60 feet, peat soil represents a massive store of the world’s carbon. Stripped of its trees and drained, tropical peat decays and releases its carbon into the atmosphere, and as it dries it becomes extremely susceptible to burning, intentional or accidental. Massive annual fires set deliberately to clear previously forested land for new oil palm plantations—and exacerbated by frequent drought—have burned out of control and filled Borneo’s skies with smoke, closing airports and causing respiratory problems for millions of people as far away as mainland Asia. Carbon released by decaying peat soil, fires, and deforestation has pushed Indonesia into third place among nations as a source of greenhouse gases, behind only heavily industrialized China and the United States.

Time is running out for Borneo’s rain forests. Conventional models offer little hope. Setting aside large areas as parks or reserves, standard practice in the U.S. and other countries, has been largely ineffective, at least on the Indonesian part of Borneo, undermined by inadequate funding, lack of support from local residents, and government corruption. But many conservationists say that logging, often regarded as anathema to wildlife, may, if practiced sustainably, in fact help to protect a significant portion of the island’s biodiversity.

“Virgin rain forest is a dead concept now in Borneo,” says Glen Reynolds, chief scientist at the Danum Valley Field Center in Sabah. “All of the big areas of primary lowland forest that can be conserved already have been. It’s difficult, but now what you’ve got to do is convince people that what we think of as degraded forest can sustain biodiversity.”

The message is complex but ultimately clear. To protect Borneo’s forests and wildlife will require rethinking old ideas, accepting new truths, and adopting new models of conservation. And in the end, the fate of Borneo may be decided far from the forests, in government offices and corporate boardrooms from New York to Geneva. Because of the vast amounts of carbon tied up in the plants and soils, the last best hope for Borneo’s future may rest not on the emotional appeal of an orangutan’s face, but on the hard facts of climate change—and our own determination and ability to protect ourselves from disaster.

On the opposite side of Borneo from Sabah, in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, a narrow paved road leads away from Pontianak, a city near the South China Sea. Crowded with trucks and buzzing motorbikes, the road passes wooden shops and houses in small villages separated by rice fields. The harvest has just begun, and here and there people beat sheaves against wooden lattices or toss grains into the air to let the wind carry away the hulls. There’s little trace of the forests that once stood here.

I’m traveling with Dessy Ratnasari, a scientist from a local research organization, whose animated face is encircled by a light blue head scarf. Our driver, Harun—who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name—speaks up as we pass a large building fringed with weeds.

“This is a sawmill where he worked,” Ratnasari translates. “It went bankrupt because there are no more trees for timber. It had 1,300 workers and a payroll of 800 million rupiah a month”—about $90,000. Within a couple of miles we pass two more mills, gates locked, windows broken, parking lots empty.

“There were several big companies and some smaller mills around Pontianak,” Harun says. “Now there’s only one big company still operating.”

How did nearly a third of the rain forest that stood on Borneo in 1985 disappear by 2005? An easy, and only slightly oversimplified, answer can be found in the initials that Indonesians use as an explanation for many of their country’s troubles: KKN, for korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme (corruption, collusion, nepotism). During the 32-year presidency of Suharto, until he was forced from office in 1998, Indonesian forests were among the many resources treated as personal wealth by him, his family, and military officials who helped keep him in office. Since Suharto, political power has been decentralized, and decision-making about natural resources has become more localized. Unfortunately, too often the result has been what one conservationist calls “the democratization of corruption.”

Local officials, having watched Suharto et al. loot the country for decades, began cashing in themselves. Many provincial governors, district bupati (regents), and police avidly took bribes: from timber companies, to grant logging permits in nominally protected forests; from illegal loggers, to ignore intrusions into national parks; and from oil palm companies, to allow wholesale clearing and burning of forestlands for plantations. Chaotically confused jurisdiction and land-ownership issues made matters worse. Although the national government claims to administer forestry laws, provinces and districts often issue land-use permits independently, and conflicting court decisions contributed to the free-for-all atmosphere.

Across the border in Malaysian Borneo, the state of Sarawak has been controlled for 27 years by Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, whose administration is widely regarded as dictatorial and corrupt. Uncontrolled logging has so greatly depleted Sarawak’s forests that most conservationists working to save Borneo’s biodiversity have, in a kind of environmental triage, essentially given up and focused their attentions elsewhere on the island. Having ravaged its forests, Sarawak has now turned its attention to its large areas of coastal peat swamp forest, rapidly converting tracts to oil palm despite environmentalists’ concerns over carbon emissions.

The natural world fares better in Sabah, the Malaysian state in northeastern Borneo. Though oil palm plantations have burgeoned here, more than half of Sabah remains forested. Much of the forest has been heavily logged, and more and more acres converted to commercial tree plantations, but Sabah sustains some of the best surviving examples of high-quality rain forest: the Danum Valley and Maliau Basin Conservation Areas. (The nation of Brunei has so much money from petroleum that there’s been no need to exploit its forests. It retains some of the best rain forest on Borneo, but, since it occupies less than one percent of the island, it makes a negligible contribution to the overall conservation picture.)

“Good governance” is a bureaucratic phrase often used by diplomats and nongovernmental organizations working in Indonesia and Malaysia. What it means in plain terms is removing the hands of politicians and their cronies from the pockets of poor people and opening up government actions to public scrutiny and free debate. Everyone working on conservation in Borneo agrees that no efforts—no laws or regulations, no new parks or protected areas—will be effective without it.

“Governance is almost everything, in that if we can’t get it right, nothing else matters,” says Frances Seymour of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), an international organization headquartered in Indonesia and committed to conserving forests and improving the livelihoods of people in the tropics. There have been encouraging signs of progress in Indonesia—at least at the higher levels of government—especially since 2004, when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected president. Another major step began in 2000 when the national police force loosened ties with the military, a notoriously corrupt organization with long-standing links to illegal logging and smuggling. Even better news came in 2005, when General Sutanto was appointed national chief of police. “No law enforcement head anywhere in the world has made as much progress as he has,” a senior U.S. official in Jakarta told me.

Hundreds of arrests for illegal logging activities have been made since then, targeting not just workers in the field (who may make as little as two dollars a day), but also, occasionally, mid-level timber buyers and government officials, including the ex-governor of the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan and many workers in the corruption-tainted Ministry of Forestry. Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, once a horror story of uncontrolled illegal logging and poaching, has seen a major turnaround thanks to an honest and dedicated director whose rangers patrol the park with ultralight aircraft and motorboats.

On a national level, many Indonesian ministers get high marks, or at least grudgingly awarded passing grades, for their dedication to reform. “And yet I will say that in this village there is no question that it’s impossible to get a policeman to do anything without being asked for a bribe,” a person connected to a small conservation group tells me. (As happened often when I talked with activists, I was asked not to name the speaker.) “The bupati has friends in Jakarta who could shut us down,” another NGO worker says. “It’s a fine line you have to walk here. They could crush us if they wanted to.”

In several district capital towns I visited, the most obvious result of increased local autonomy was a showy new government office complex; the second-most-obvious was the bupati’s showy new house. “The challenge,” Frances Seymour says, “is how we help communities and local governments make better decisions for the long term, because what’s going on now is a short-term spasm of making money, and ten years from now jobs are going to be gone and income sources are going to be gone.” And the Indonesian hinterlands will remain as poor as ever.

A highway winds through jagged limestone hills in East Kalimantan, following a route that five years ago was a dirt logging road. Today there’s nothing but scrub in all directions. Every mile or so, as the highway crosses a ravine, there’s a minor cave-in that’s caused the lane on the downhill side to collapse. We rarely have to slow down, though, because there’s almost no other traffic. Sometimes these bus-size chasms are marked with branches piled in the road, and sometimes they’re not.

“The contractor gives a kickback to the government to get the paving contract, and then they purposely do a bad job so they can come back in a few years for repair work and everybody can make more money,” one of my companions says. By now I’ve heard stories like this so often that they seem normal.

After crossing a bridge over the Telen River, we stop near a roadside house that barely qualifies for the name. It’s an open-air wooden platform no more than ten feet square, elevated on logs head-high off the ground. The roof is a sheet of blue plastic suspended from poles. A woman and two children are on the platform and three more children are playing underneath.

Felled tree trunks are scattered across a field beyond the house; the ground is blackened from recent burning, and smoke rises here and there. Several men and women work in the field with machetes and long digging sticks made of belian, or ironwood. This is forest destruction and habitat loss happening before my eyes.

Two men come over to talk with us—Udan Usat and Ismael, uncle and nephew. They wear Javanese-style conical straw hats against the intense sun. Their faces and arms are coated with soot, and sweat makes small rivulets on their skin.

They are of the Kenyah tribe, and they moved here last year. Before, they lived in a village called Long Noran on the Wahau River, in the interior of Borneo. The forest there is long gone, cut by a big timber company once owned by the notorious Bob Hasan, a Suharto crony and former government minister who was later convicted of corruption. With only scrub left, the entire area around their village, which stood inside the company’s timber concession, burned in massive fires in 1997-98. The blazes were ignited by companies preparing land for plantations and spread rapidly to neighboring land during a season of drought.

“We had gardens, fruit trees, rubber trees, and vegetable fields, all burned,” Udan Usat says. “There was conflict with the timber company. They accused us of starting the fires, but we didn’t do it. The fires came from far away.”

Things were very hard after that. “Where we lived it was an hour by boat and 15 kilometers by land to reach the nearest settlement with a market,” he says. “It was expensive to use the boat.”

The government promised that each family could have five hectares, about 12 acres, along the road here, if they wanted to move. Some of the villagers came to look at the land, there was a meeting, and 169 families decided to start over again at this place.

“Here, we are between two towns, so it will be easier to sell our crops when the fields begin producing,” Ismael says. Neighboring families are helping each other, working on a different plot each day. They will grow rice, bananas, and the spiny red fruit called rambutan. The burning they’ve just done will help the fertility of the soil, and they hope to have their first crops next year. Families are living in temporary shelters for now, because it’s more important to plant the fields than build permanent houses. Ismael was head of an elementary school in Long Noran, and someday, if there are enough children here on the Telen River, the families may build a school.

“Life will be better here—that is our hope,” Ismael says.

I thank these men for talking with me, and wonder whether I should give them money for their time. My binoculars cost more than the two of them will make in an entire year. I turn to go, and one of the children, a girl about seven years old, is holding a plastic bag with two ontok, fried dough balls; and lemper, rice wrapped in coconut leaf—a gift of food for me. She hands me the bag, and her smile shatters my heart.

Despite the stupendous new skyscrapers erupting around Jakarta, despite the new cars clogging its streets, the essential fact influencing conservation in Borneo is the extreme poverty of most Indonesians, who occupy three-quarters of the island. Whatever strategies environmentalists pursue to save Borneo’s biodiversity must first offer ways for its residents to improve their lives.

“Nothing is more important than hunger,” says Albertus of the Pontianak-based group Green Borneo. “Funding agencies need to change their way of thinking about this. Better health, better education, better economic conditions—that will help protect the forest.”

Even as she shows me West Kalimantan ecosystems and economies wrecked by unsustainable logging, Dessy Ratnasari makes sure I know the benefits it brought. “Many people in West Kalimantan grew up on money from timber companies,” she says. “I grew up on the multiplier effects, because my father had a small clothing store, and the money people spent there came from timber. That is why I was able to go to school and get an education.”

Hati-hati is one of the few phrases of Indonesian I’ve learned. It means “be careful,” as on the signs along this bumpy dirt road reading “Hati-Hati Logging.” It’s a hot morning in East Kalimantan, and I’m riding in a truck with Erik Meijaard, a Dutch conservation scientist associated with the Nature Conservancy who has worked in Borneo for 15 years, and his colleague Nardiyono. We’ve passed through miles of scrubland, and the landscape shows no sign of changing anytime soon. Once lowland rain forest, this area was clear-cut and never reforested. In the fires of 1997-98, it was part of the estimated 6.5 million acres of forest that burned in East Kalimantan. Now it is only bushes, small trees, ferns, and grass, overrun with vines. I stare at the passing scene, thinking that, if nothing else, the government responsible for allowing this is guilty of criminal negligence.

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” Meijaard says, reading my thoughts. “And yet,” he continues, “this is the kind of forest where Nardi and I find some of our highest concentrations of orangutans.” By “find” he means they have counted the nests that orangutans make each night or discovered other signs indicating the animals’ presence. Orangutans are the most solitary of the great apes, difficult to spot even where they exist in good numbers. Meijaard has already told me that he has actually seen only two wild orangutans in the past two and a half years of regular fieldwork.

The truck crests a low rise in the road and—I almost feel I should interject here I am not making this up—there’s a dark reddish-brown form in the road ahead. I see it, but my mind seems to stall. Midday … worthless scrubland … animal in the road … What? Gibbon?

“Orangutan!” Erik and Nardi shout in unison. The truck skids to a stop, and we all jump out as the orangutan retreats into the low woods beside the road. I follow it with my binoculars as it scuttles away, stopping repeatedly to look back at us, until it moves downslope out of sight.

The normally taciturn Nardi is beside himself. “You are so lucky!” he says, over and over. “An orangutan, right in the road!” Expletives and superlatives abound. Visitors to Borneo rarely see a wild orangutan; most see the semi-tame animals at well-known rehabilitation centers such as Sepilok in Sabah or Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan.

There’s more to this incident, though, than simply my winning-the-Powerball good fortune. What I’ve just seen symbolizes one of the most important issues for Borneo’s biodiversity—and a tenuous hope for preserving it.

“The logged forest is the future for wildlife in Borneo,” says Siew Te Wong, who works on conservation of the threatened sun bear.

“In Borneo, species do not go extinct over a broad area as a result of one round of logging, or even two and possibly three,” says Junaidi Payne of WWF’s Sabah office. “The balance of species changes enormously, but even the specialist birds or orchids or epiphytes are still there if you look in little valleys and the wet areas. So you can log forests and still save that biodiversity. But the thing you can’t do is convert the whole thing to monoculture plantations,” such as oil palm. “Then of course you lose everything. It’s a biological desert.”

WWF geographer Raymond Alfred shows me around Sabah’s state-owned Ulu Segama Forest Reserve, where the forest has been thoroughly—and legally—logged, leaving woodland that seems downright puny compared with the skyscraping rain forest at nearby Danum Valley. Yet researchers have found Borneo’s highest concentration of orangutans here, and the species is thriving in similar spots all around the island. Alfred and other Sabah conservationists managed to convince the government to save this degraded forest, once set for conversion to oil palm. A ten-year moratorium on logging has given them time to study the orangutans, and they hope to establish a lodge and attract some of the tourists who visit the nearby Kinabatangan River Sepilok rehabilitation center.

In East Kalimantan, Meijaard has spent much of his time in recent years working with logging companies to help them harvest trees sustainably, and with local villages to find ways for them to derive income from the forest. Purists may imagine the major conservation goal in Borneo to be the setting aside of vast tracts of untouched forest, but for biologists dealing with day-to-day reality, compromise is the only realistic alternative.

When Meijaard spends time in villages discussing the choice between forest conservation and oil palm plantations, he never mentions orangutans. “People get bored with that in five minutes. To them it’s just another monkey in a tree that Western people want to come and look at. But if I talk to them about fish in the rivers or pigs in the forest, then they pay attention, because those are resources they can harvest from the forest.”

Meijaard is unsentimental about timber harvesting and the sanctity of virgin rain forest. “Hey, it’s the tropics. Plants will grow back,” he says. “These forests have to earn their money somehow.” Otherwise, they’ll inevitably be turned into plantations of oil palm or pulpwood.

“You’re trying to get people who have economic opportunities right now to forgo those benefits for other benefits years down the road,” orangutan conservationist Paul Hartman says. “The bupati is in office for five years, and he says, ‘I’m going to make my money now.’ “

Sustainable forest management—logging that provides income without compromising the long-term viability of the ecosystem, won’t be an easy sell. In Sangatta, East Kalimantan, I talk with Daddy Ruhiyat, an adviser to the local government on conservation issues. “We have asked forestry companies to show us that forests can be as financially productive as oil palm,” he says. “But nowadays there are no fresh ideas coming from the forestry sector to make land more productive. We have a choice of either good forest and no money, or cut down the forest for palm oil. There is a long list of companies asking for land for palm oil development.”

Ruhiyat sees a role for forestry in his district, but primarily in plantations of fast-growing teak, which can be harvested every 15 years. “We want species that can be productive in a relatively short rotation,” he says. “We have to grow forests in plantations. That is the only way.”

I ask him how he feels about someone like me, from a country that cut its forests, mined its coal, depleted its wildlife, and became wealthy, coming to Borneo to question local people’s decisions about conservation.

“It is reasonable that people in other countries are concerned about the Borneo environment,” he says. “I’m not resentful of that. But the most important step is to make people have better incomes. It starts with oil palm plantations, which bring money so people can enjoy better lives. It is hard for hungry people to appreciate nature.”

Glen Reynolds of the Danum Valley Field Center says that “payment for environmental services” is the only thing that will tip the balance away from clear-cutting and palm plantations. He uses the broad term for finding ways to pay communities, regions, or countries to keep their ecosystems healthy and functioning. “Without that there’s going to be no lowland forest left on Borneo in ten years,” Reynolds says.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases to combat climate change controversially made no provision to pay for protection of existing forests—”avoided deforestation”— but the December 2007 multinational conference in Bali, Indonesia, took up the issue as it considered revisions to the Kyoto pact. A new acronym, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), came to the forefront of the climate-change debate, and conservationists in Borneo immediately saw it as perhaps the last, best hope for the future—offering the possibility of a framework for rich nations to combat climate change by paying for the preservation of significant tracts of tropical rain forest. An array of daunting problems stand in the way of REDD implementation, but for people watching Borneo’s forest disappear, it’s a chance.

“REDD, I would argue, is the one big prospect on the horizon,” Frances Seymour of CIFOR says. “Let’s be clear here: Why do people cut down trees? For the money. If you can give people the opportunity to make the same amount of money or more by leaving the trees standing, there’s your answer.”

In the end, conservation in Borneo is not about the beauty of the rain forest, or about orangutans, or elephants, or even oil palm. Not one conservationist I spoke with believed oil palm was intrinsically evil, and most agreed that a properly managed industry can benefit poor people without sacrificing Borneo’s biological riches. Anne Casson, co-founder of the environmental group SEKALA, speaks for most when she says, “I don’t think anyone’s saying you can’t have any more oil palm. It’s just, where does it go? It can go onto degraded land rather than forested land. Until now, oil palm permits have been allocated in an ad hoc manner, regardless of environmental concerns. This can change if there is sufficient political will and good spatial planning.”

But it all comes down to one thing. “It’s about money,” Casson says. “Money, money, money.”

Here is another dream. Along a dirt road in southern Borneo stands a one-room wooden house, with a few banana trees in the yard and a small vegetable garden in back. Beside the house a man kneels, washing a Yamaha Jupiter Z motorbike. It’s red, and it shines in the hot sun as the man rinses off the soap.

The man’s name is, let’s say, Pak Wang. With his new motorbike he can go to the closest village in a few minutes, instead of walking nearly an hour along the road. In the village he can meet his friends, buy things, go to the little karaoke bar, and watch television in his uncle’s restaurant. He can feel part of the world.

Pak Wang wants a mobile phone. Most of his friends have one, and if he had one it would be easier for him to make plans with them, to know where they will be on Sunday night, to meet the pretty woman named Unita who sells fruit at a street stand in town.

So. Here is the message to the world. If we want to protect the forests of Borneo, to preserve a substantial part of its stupendous biodiversity, to make sure that orangutans have places to make their nightly nests and hornbills have fruit to eat and flying frogs have trees to live in, there’s only one way to do it. We need to find a way for Pak Wang to buy his mobile phone. And, after he marries the pretty fruitseller, a way for them to keep their children healthy and send them to school. A way that offers them a better future without having to turn their forests into plantations of oil palm or the sterile pits of strip mines.

And we need to do it while there’s still something left to protect.

Tags: Borneo, conservation, rainforest, sun bear
Comments (1)

BSBCC Phase I nearly complete

Category: BSBCC
Date: January 24th 2010
By: siew-te-wong

Photo and Text by Ian Hall http://arkitrek.com/http:/arkitrek.com/bsbcc-phase-i-nearly-complete/

The new bear house at the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre Should have been completed this month however we have been delayed by bad weather.

Our site being low lying and barely above the water table has degenerated into bottomless gloop. Luckily most of the building was up before the rainy season but materials deliveries and availability of dry working space has suffered. Under the conditions the contractor has done us proud and the quality of workmanship in the most important components, the cages, is excellent.

We’re now putting the final touches to an array of slide bars, pulleys, clamps, locks and counterweights that will make operation of the building safe for both bears and keepers.

One final hurdle remains after that, to connect the forest enclosure electric fencing to the building so that the bears’ release into a natural environment can be controlled. There has been much chin scratching on the part of all partners; Wildlife, Forestry and BSBCC on this one. Wildlife Dept are concerned about orang-utans getting into the bear enclosure and Forestry Dept are concerned about how they are going to prune trees to prevent arboreal bears from escaping the enclosure!

It was never going to be an easy task ensuring that captive bears have controlled access to primary rainforest however this is the feature that will set this sanctuary / conservation centre apart from any other.

A bird view of the kitchen area of the new bear house.

Eletric fence traning area. It is here we will train the bear not to come close to the fence with hot (eletric) wire, or, they will get zapp!

The contractor giving a briefing during the site inspection last week by LEAP, Sabah Wildlife Department and Sabah Forestry Department.

Tags: Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, construction, Ian Hall, Sabah, sun bear
Comments (3)

World Challenge volunteers, we thank you!

Category: BSBCC, Volunteers
Date: January 22nd 2010
By: siew-te-wong

By Wai Pak and Howard Stanton

There were three groups of young people arrive at the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre from 27^th of November to 20^th of December 2009. These three groups were all apart of the World Challenge volunteer program, aged 14 – 18 years old, numbered 41 in total.

The groups were tasked with designing and building a section of the visitor’s boardwalk, all groups worked exceptionally hard to fulfil their brief and achieve the work that they were tasked with. The groups had limited experience and knowledge of skills needed to undertake the assignment but tackled the job with motivation determination and enthusiasm from the very beginning, in the process exceeding the expectations of those of us here at BSBCC and producing a well designed and built section of the boardwalk.

BSBCC would like to express its greatest appreciation to all the young volunteers that helped with the boardwalk construction. BSBCC would also like to thank all those that made it possible for these fine young people to come over and help these needy animals. BSBCC is extremely thankful and grateful to all three groups for the fund that they donated, as a result of their hard work in fund raising back in Australia. BSBCC will channel the donations into the second and third phase of the construction and ensure that every cent that was hard earned from their fund raising will be put to its best use.

BSBCC and all involved with these three groups were very impressed to hear about all the background research and planning that all these individuals had undertaken just so that they could get to Borneo and work hard for the good of the Sun Bears. All volunteers raised the money for the trip themselves and undertaken individual and group fund raising activities to ensure that they raised the appropriate funds, we at BSBCC salute you all !!

For sure, all these volunteers have gained lots of sweet memories here in Sepilok. Their effort will be much more appreciated when the centre is open to the public and we at BSBCC look forward to welcoming them all back to see and enjoy the fruits of their labours.

1^st Group: Smiths Hill, N, Beaches & Wollongong Schools.

27 Nov 2009 – 2 Dec 2009

14 volunteers, 2 leaders

14 -16 years old

Mrs Grant (headmistress, if I am not mistaken) : miffy1@live.com

Donation: RM1600 from every volunteer,

RM2000 fundraised at their school

2^nd Group: Aquinas College (plus Howard)

9Dec 2009- 14 Dec 2009

16 – 18 years old

Leader: Craig Cleeland :cleelandcs@aquinas.vic.edu.au

frog_pond@bigpond.com

Donation: RM3040

3^rd group: Ruyton Girls School

15 Dec 2009 -20 Dec 2009

15 volunteers, 3 leaders

15 – 17 years old

Kate Guggenheimer (Leader): gu@ruyton.vic.edu.au

Donation: RM9150

Tags: Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, sun bear, Volunteer, Wold Challenge
Comments (3)

New year, new hope for sun bear!

Category: BSBCC, Siew Te Wong, Uncategorized, captivity
Date: January 16th 2010
By: siew-te-wong

The year of 2009 was sure a quick year to pass. Without much notice, we entered a new decade. For me, 2010 is a year of anticipation and a year of bearing fruits after many years of hard works. It will be this year that the mission impossible become possible.

Back in 2004, I conducted a nationwide survey of sun bear status in Malaysia and visited many zoos, private menageries, mini zoos, crocodile farms, etc., including Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre (SORC) in Sandakan, to better understand the situation of the captive sun bears in Malaysia. It is here at SORC that the Sabah Wildlife Department housed all of the confiscated sun bears in separate cells. These cells are “cell”, cages with nothing in it. Like all of the captive sun bears which I called “caged sun bears”, they looked sad, stress and nervous. The only activity that these bears did all day was pacing. Regardless of the sizes of the cages, they paced from one end of the cage to the other end of the cage. For those even more unfortunate bears with tiny cages to a point where pacing is not possible, they jiggled their head in circle, sometime so fast that I cannot keep track of the movement.

It may not mean anything to an ordinary local folk who treated an animal as an animal. But to me, I can tell from years of loving and care for animals that these bears were suffering, in severe stress and pain under this kind of unacceptable living environment. If this were to happen to a human, he or she would have physiological breakdown or turn crazy in days. However, because they are bears, one of very tough animal in the Kingdom Animalia (Animal), they will stay alive until they die of old age in this kind of living condition for years, as long as they are being fed with any kind of food. I mean, “any kind,” as long as it is food!

It was here I first met Ann, a SORC’s volunteer from UK probably at her 60s. Her face full of wrinkles but she has a strong heart full of love for animals, especially the orangutans. She grasped my hand with her strong arm when I first told her who I was (co-chair of the newly formed Sin Bear Expert Team, under the IUCN Bear Specialist Group), “YOU MUST HELP THESE BEARS! YOU MUST!!” she said with shaking voice. “I WILL help these bears, Ann. I will help you all bears” I reassured her and the bears again and again before I left.

It was not easy for me to found the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre (BSBCC). It took six years for us to come this far to what it is today. By March this year, the Phase one of the constructions will be completed and the 12 sun bears under our care now will be move to the new bear house with forest enclosure. We can rescue more cage bears that live in horrible condition because after March this year we will have the facility to house them and taking care of them, all. To all of them, this will be the first time that they step on earth, sniff the forest, and dig the soil, since they were captured by poachers as a baby bear many years ago. By March this year, I can look into Ann’s eyes and say, “I have helped them, Ann.” “I have kept my promise to help you, bears!”

This year is an important year for sun bear not only our first new bear house will be completed and all the hard work that we have been doing for the past two years can finally paid off. It is also the year that sun bear gain more attention and helps for the first time around the world. Ursa Freedon Project, a new NGO founded last year with the aim to help all the eight species of bears, will put their effort this year to help sun bear and BSBCC. There are 3 sun bear studies in the wild stated last year with additional three or more will join the team of sun bear researchers this year in different parts of Southeast Asia. I will soon complete my doctorate degree and return to Malaysia to serve the rest of my life and career for the sun bears and BSBCC. All of these activities will make sun bears receive the attentions and supports that never happens before in the past. This year is not just the year of the tiger, but is also the year for the sun bear as well.

I have high hope that many can be achieve this year with a lot of helps from across the world. The next challenge for BSBCC is to raise additional UD$400,000 in order to complete the Phase 2 and 3. It is only when we completed the Phase 2 of the construction (the visitor gallery and viewing facility), we could then open our facility to the public and visitor who wish to learn more about sun bear and see our sun bear in natural enclosures. We can also generate revenue from the visitors to pay for our expenses and our education, conservation and research programs. In other word, we will be self sustained after the completion of Phase 2.

I sincerely thank all of you over and over again for your immense helps over the past many years in many ways to help us grow and help sun bears. It is your helps, contribution, and supports that make us come this far. However, we still need your help to bring a better future for sun bears and all of the wildlife and nature that we care and love so much. Please help us spread the words of our work and the plight of the sun bear during your free time. You can easily tell your friends about it, post our news in your facebook and other social networking tool online. Even better, help us raise fund, contribute your time working with us, study sun bears, and many other things that you do best.

I can do all the works to study the sun bears in the rainforest of Borneo and live there for 6 years; I can do all the works of founding BSBCC; I can do all the emailing and bloging to send the message out to you in every corner of the world as long as there are internet connection. However, I simply cannot do a lot more that needed to be done without your help for saving all of the sun bears and protecting their habitat and other wildlife and wild place

The year 2010 is the year of sun bear and we have high hope for more helps is coming during this year. Together we could make a difference and a better world for the bears and for ourselves.

Tags: Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, construction, Sabah, Siew Te Wong, sun bear
Comments (6)

We wish you a beary Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Category: BSBCC, Siew Te Wong
Date: December 23rd 2009
By: siew-te-wong

On behalf of Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre and all the sun bears in the world, I would like to wish you a BEARY Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank you all for being a big fan of sun bears and supporters of BSBCC over the past year. With your help and support in many ways, our first new bear house will be complete in two more months and soon the confiscated sun bears within our care can have a better and more natural home to stay.

It is not easy that we come this far. We did it because of your help and support!

It has been a pleasure and honor to be able to work with you and the sun bears. With our Phase 1 of the construction come to an end, we hope you could continue to support us and help us on the Phase 2 of the construction work and our works planned for the future!

You can always read more about our works and the bears at http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org/.

Tired of reading? You can also visit our youtube site to watch videos about sun bear Thank you all!

We wish you a Beary Christmas! We wish you a Beary Christmas! We wish you a Beary Christmas!

And a Happy New Year!

Tags: Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, Sabah, Siew Te Wong, sun bear
Comments (1)

We are almost there!

Category: BSBCC
Date: December 22nd 2009
By: siew-te-wong

Here is a video of photos taken during the last two months. As you can see, WE ARE ALMOST THERE!

The construction of our first bear house is at the last stage and soon will start constructing the fencing of the forest enclosures.

It has been a long wait, I know. It has not been easy, I know. I would like to take this oppurtunity to THANK all of you, yes, you, for being a great supporter and helps in many ways to make us come this long.

Now, I can look into the eyes of our beloved sun bears in our centre, and tell them: hang in there, WE ARE ALMOST THERE!

Tags: Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, BSBCC, construction, Sabah, sun bear
Comments (0)

Raleigh comes to the BSBCC!

Category: BSBCC, Volunteers
Date: December 11th 2009
By: siew-te-wong

By: Vicki, Brony, Charlie, Emma, jack, Ali.

Raleigh, formally known as Raleigh international, is a youth and education charity which gives people a chance to explore the world and by doing so discover their potential as leaders and members of a team working together to make a difference. Raleigh first began working in Malaysia in 1987 and since 2003 has been in Sabah, North Borneo.

This year has seen various projects developing across Sabah, with the help of Raleigh volunteers, including community-based projects, such as the installation of gravity water feed systems and the building of kindergartens. Raleigh also however, aims at enabling young people to get involved with environmental projects and as of this year this has included the development of the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, which Raleigh believes is the most exciting new conservation initiative in Borneo. This is a truly unique project and us volunteers on Raleigh’s third and final phase are excited about getting stuck into the work here.

The group consists of 11 venturers – Charlie, Emma, Ali, Bryony, Leo, James, Lottie, Vicki, Thijs, Andrew, Jack and 4 project managers – Jessie, Craig, Nicky and Phil. So far we have been cracking on with the “bear-proofing” of existing perimeter fences by installing metal rods into the ground. This process involves hammering 4ft iron rods securely into the ground so that the bears will not be able to dig under the fence as is naturally expected of them. We have also been dividing the enclosure into three separate areas to accommodate for the different behaviours and requirements of each bear. For example, bears of a similar age need to be kept together, more aggressive bears may need to be separated and the gender of the bears also has to be considered. Ultimately, Sun Bears potentially suited for re-release into the wild should be separated from those who would be incapable of surviving in the wild.

So far the project has been hard work, but exciting, as every day brings with it new experiences of all sorts. We’ve had encounters with the resident orang-utans of which there are two. One in particular has proved to be a great fan of relieving venturers of their water bottles and biscuits at break time. We’ve also had dealings with mischievous macaques, terrifying tarantulas and massive monitor lizards!!

There was excitement here at the BSBCC when Suria, a sun bear suffering with an injured paw, was deemed healthy enough to be moved to more comfortable surroundings after 3 months of recovery. The occasion was marked with a mutual sense of hope that the rehabilitation process of such bears will one day prove as successful as their neighbours at the Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre, Sepilok.

Cutting the metal rods requires both strength and skill.

Jessie, project manager is having discussion with Billy, the architect assistant on the working site.

Tags: Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, Raleigh International, sun bear, Volunteers
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