Five young orangutans found in a Balasore casuarina stand, now quarantined at Nandankanan

Five young orangutans that do not belong in India were taken from a casuarina plantation in Odisha's Balasore district on Tuesday and driven overnight to Nandankanan Zoological Park. Three are male, two female. Forest officers put their ages between six months and one year. One arrived with a fever and was treated. All five are in quarantine, eating bananas, apples, dry fruit and milk, and staying close to one another.

Villagers at Bichitrapur in Bhograi block saw the animals clinging to trees on Tuesday morning and called the forest staff. Regional Chief Conservator of Forests Prakash Chand Gogineni said the find was in the Udayapur section of the Jaleswar Range, in the Udayapur-Talsari belt. Balasore DFO Pratik Prakash Indalkar said the group looked healthy enough to feed. Gogineni called it a botched transit job: the apes were brought in and then dumped.

Orangutans live in the forests of Borneo and Sumatra. There is no wild corridor from those islands to the Bay of Bengal. Forest and Environment Minister Ganesh Ram Singhkhuntia put the international street price at Rs 20 lakh to Rs 25 lakh each and said the state had asked the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to take the case. He told airports, railway stations and ports to pull CCTV. A separate field team is working the Badapai-Ranakatha stretch.

By Wednesday the Special Task Force was in Balasore. DIG Kanwar Vishal Singh said a team had gone to start the inquiry and that forest officers were cooperating. The lead that officers are willing to name is a black Thar SUV seen passing through the area on Monday night, the evening before the apes were found. CCTV from that road is being collected. No arrests have been announced.

Nandankanan will not put the five on public view unless the Central Zoo Authority says so. That is the correct order of work. The animals need veterinary notes, a species confirmation and a decision about whether they go to an Indian zoo long term or back to a range state under CITES. Indonesia and Malaysia are the two governments that would have to be asked if repatriation is the aim. Neither has commented in public on this seizure.

The case sits in a known trade. Infant orangutans are taken from killed or captured mothers and moved through ports in Southeast Asia toward buyers in the Gulf, China and, less often, South Asia. A drop of five infants on an Odisha beach plantation is a large mistake if the destination was somewhere else, or a staging choice if the next vehicle never came. Either reading implies a route that already used Indian ground.

Singhkhuntia said the apes might have arrived by air, rail or sea. Those are the three doors WCCB will test. The Thar is the first domestic vehicle in the file. If the plates and the night footage hold, the STF will have a person to question before the animals have finished quarantine. If the footage dissolves, the five infants at Nandankanan will still be evidence that a shipment crossed into India and that someone cut them loose rather than risk a checkpoint.