Bringing up baby

I spent today caring for Mahal, our baby orangutan, so I thought I'd use today's blog space to explain what is involved with raising a baby orangutan the right way.

Raising a baby ape by hand is something we really don't want to do at all. Both Hadiah (Mahal's mom) and Kwisha (the mom of Umande the gorilla whom we raised last year) were young, inexperienced moms who were hand-raised themselves. As such, they were scared when their little ones came into the world and as a result chose the "hands off" approach. In both of these cases we tried for several days to give the babies back to mom, hoping she'd eventually want the baby back. But in both cases we had to raise the babies.

Once we decide that we have to hand-raise, our already arranged just-in-case team of hand-raisers steps in and from then on it is a 24/7 commitment to the little one. Mahal's team consists of 12 people working mostly 8-hour shifts around the clock. We have a night nursery set up in part of our kitchen which has a bed in it for the night caregiver. If his orangutan mom was raising him, he would be clinging onto her for the first several months of his life. We mimic this as much as possible, although we have to encourage him to be more independent than normal so we can reintroduce him at a younger age.

We wear scrubs when caring for Mahal and he is required to hold onto the scrubs whenever we're moving around, just as he'd cling to mom's hair. Sometimes he grabs our hair or skin, too! We spend as much time each day next to the other orangutans as we can. They can touch him through the mesh as long as they're being gentle. This helps him to know what orangutans are, so he won't be afraid of them when we put him back. When he's visible to the public or to other orangutans, he never has diapers on. We don't want the orangutans to be confused or the public to think he's make a good pet (he would not!). This lack of diapers means we often get peed or pooped on - thankfully scrubs dry quickly!

Mahal drinks human baby formula out of human baby bottles several times a day. We try to encourage him to take his bottle through the mesh of the exhibit, since that's how he'll have to drink it when he's back with the other orangutans. We also offer him some solid foods (he has 3 teeth), but food seems to repulse him right now. We spend our day playing with him, feeding him, and even sleeping with him.

Mahal was 4.4 lbs when he was born on April 4 and is now ~11.5 lbs. We hope one of our other orangutans will be interested in adopting him in a couple months.