Indonesia moves to bring home five baby orangutans found in an Odisha forest

Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry said on Friday it is working with Indian authorities to repatriate five infant orangutans found motherless in a forest in Balasore district, Odisha, on Tuesday, 8 September. The apes are not native to India. Their only wild range is Sumatra and Borneo. That fact is why both governments are treating the find as a trafficking case until DNA says otherwise.

Rangers on patrol in the Bhogarai and Udaipur forest block near Jaleswar, close to the West Bengal border, came across the five animals. Villagers in the Ramanatha forests had also reported them. Early counts describe three males and two females. Age estimates differ by source. Indian wildlife groups have spoken of six to eight months. The Indonesian ministry’s public note puts them at about one to one-and-a-half years. All five were reported to be in decent health and were moved to Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar for quarantine.

Ristianto Pribadi, head of the ministry’s public relations and foreign cooperation bureau, said preliminary physical traits suggest Sumatran orangutans. He was careful to call that a first look. Indonesia’s scientific authority, BRIN, and Indian counterparts are to run DNA tests before anyone signs a transfer.

The paper trail already moving

On 10 September the Indonesian ministry wrote to India’s CITES Management Authority. The letter, described by The Wire and by the Wildlife Society of Orissa, offers help with a speedy return if genetics show an Indonesian origin. It asks India to confirm the incident, to share the state of the criminal investigation, and to treat the animals as Appendix I specimens. All orangutans sit on that list, which bans commercial trade.

Jakarta says it has also spoken to the Indian embassy in Jakarta, the Indonesian embassy in New Delhi, and India’s agriculture ministry, which handles some quarantine steps. Biswajit Mohanty, secretary of the Wildlife Society of Orissa, wrote to the Union Environment Ministry urging Delhi to finish the DNA work and, if the result is Indonesian, to send the infants back.

Odisha Police and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau are asking a simpler question: how did five baby apes from the Sunda shelf end up in a coastal forest in eastern India? Orangutans do not walk that route. Someone carried them. Infant orangutans are taken after adults are killed or after a holding camp is emptied. The absence of mothers at the find site is consistent with that pattern, though investigators have not yet named a syndicate or a port of entry.

Why the species matters for the file

Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) are listed as critically endangered. Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) are endangered. A third species, the Tapanuli orangutan, is confined to a sliver of North Sumatra. If DNA assigns these five to Sumatra, they become part of a population that conservation groups already treat as close to collapse outside protected forests. If they are Bornean, the receiving sanctuaries and the flight path change.

Nandankanan has started playing recorded Indian ragas in the quarantine area, a detail that Indian papers carried as a comfort measure. It has no bearing on origin. What matters for CITES is the lab result and a chain-of-custody record that will stand up if prosecutors later charge a trafficker.

India is a transit and destination market for exotic wildlife. Past seizures have included apes, exotic birds and reptiles moved through airports and land borders. A live find in a forest, rather than in a crate at a checkpoint, is less common and harder to map. The Balasore site sits near a state line, which splits jurisdiction unless the central wildlife crime bureau keeps the file.

What happens next

Repatriation is not automatic. India has to finish identification, confirm health, and agree a receiving centre in Indonesia, most likely a government rescue facility on Sumatra or Kalimantan rather than an immediate release to the wild. Infants this young cannot survive alone in forest. They need a long rehabilitation period with surrogate care.

Until the DNA comes back, the five stay in Bhubaneswar. Indonesia has asked for speed. Indian investigators have asked for time to trace the handlers. Those two clocks are now running on the same five animals.