"Bringing Back Baby"
The article "Bring Back Baby" from the magazine Natural History explains the story of how an orangutan baby was stolen from his mother in the Gunung Leuser National Park. Guning Leusere Park is a rehabilitation center where employees work with primates and get them ready to go back into the wild on their own. While working with two female orangutans Suma and Edita many strange things happened.
In 1997 both females gave birth and both infants died. Just as humans the orangutans mourn for their dead children. One year later Suma, one of the orangutan females gave birth to a baby boy. The park workers called him Forester. Four weeks after Forester was born Edita, the other orangutan female stole the baby. She took the infant into the trees as if he were her own. Because Edita was not the birth mother she could not produce milk to feed baby Forester. There was a risk that Forester could die of starvation. The park workers became concerned and came up with a way to get the baby away from Edita and back to Suma so that the baby wouldn’t die. They would put tranquilizers in her banana to get her to get into a cage and take the baby away from Edita. Once Edita became drowsy they took baby Forester away from her. Edita broke out of the cage and got back into the forest. To prevent the baby from being kidnapped again the workers bottled feed the baby for 4 days. Then they put the baby back with his mother Suma.
There where many interesting facts in this article about monkeys. This was the first kidnapping that was reported in orangutans but it is common in for the mother to let others of her kind to care for her young. In some types of monkey others actually take the baby right off their mother’s chest and care for the child themselves. Some researchers see this as a good thing because it benefits both the mother and the "aunt" or other relative of the baby monkey. It gives the mother a break from caring for the child and the relative will have experience when they have their own child.
This article has many strengths but it also had many weaknesses. The article gave you a good understanding about how much the young are cared for in the some primate species. It also showed the males rough play with their infants and some other facts about how they are a little too violent with the babies. Sometimes they even kill them. It also gave me a better understanding of how related the monkey is to the human. They express emotion just as humans’ do and sometimes even for the same reasons. The article's weakness was that it really didn’t give a lot of detail about the background stories of the orangutans mothers and the effects that the kidnapping had on Suma.
This article was very interesting. I thought that it was unbelievable that even in the orangutan’s life kidnappings occur. This was not a just a kidnapping the workers of the park believe that Edita was feeling such a great grief for the loss of her baby she tried to replace him. I also found it interesting that sometimes the mothers carry around their dead young for days, sometimes maybe even weeks because they can not let go of their children and almost find comfort in carrying them around. I would recommend this article to anyone because I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.
Magazine Project
Dana M
Small, Meredith F. "Brining Back Baby." Natural History. March 99, pages 68- 71.