Wait is over as orangutans explore outdoor yard

Des Moines, Iowa – October 30, 2008 – It’s been more than a year in coming, but Great Ape Trust of Iowa’s resident orangutans are making the most of the warm autumn days that remain before winter gets an icy grip on Iowa and exploring their new 3-acre outdoor forest yard.

The recently opened forest yard allows the orangutans, whose name is derived from the Malay words “orang hutan,” which literally translates to “person of the forest,” to move as they would in nature. The most arboreal of all the great apes, orangutans in the wild spend most of their time in trees, where they are safe from predators. Orangutans are semi-brachiators, which means they can swing hand over hand from branch to branch.

“Without question, this is going to provide us the opportunity to address a whole range of questions associated with orangutan mental abilities, locomotion and mental mapping that we couldn’t answer in our current facilities,” said Dr. Rob Shumaker, director of orangutan research at Great Ape Trust. “The potential for scientific investigation changes dramatically.”

The forest yard, one of the largest for captive apes in North America, was originally scheduled to open in June. However, record flooding in June along the Des Moines River, where Great Ape Trust is located, swamped the yard and delayed its opening until earlier this fall.

The yard and the additional choices it gives orangutans on where they spend time also is an important great ape welfare issue. “This is an important issue for captive apes,” Shumaker said. “It’s just intuitive there will be enormous and remarkable benefits for orangutans to be in a natural forest environment.”

Great Ape Trust officials hope to resume the organization’s member visitation program, interrupted this year by significant flooding, in 2009. For the first time since apes arrived on the great Ape Trust campus in 2004, visitors will be able to watch orangutans moving through the forest.