Over the past months, Kobe has maintained wonderful health, partly due to all the delicious bananas and pineapples she enjoys enormously. Milk is also provided to the juvenile orangutans to help them get the vital nutrients they need to keep up with their wild counterparts.
Kobe has continued to answer the call of the forest, while focusing on perfecting her climbing techniques. The rainy season in central Borneo, from November to March, seems to be Kobe’s favourite time of year. She can play in numerous waterlogged and muddy places. During forest school, Kobe darts along the undergrowth and hops right into the nearest puddle she can find, dousing her thick reddish-brown hair in the swamp water. She joyously splashes around and invites any nearby orangutans to join in her fun.
Kobe is expanding on her engineering skills by building nests, and is equally proficient at tearing old nests apart. Existing nests with their old branches are perfect natural toys for Kobe. In the future we hope to see her putting more new nests together rather than splitting old ones apart!
During forest school, Kobe likes to stretch her long arms out to grab several vines at once. She casually sways in the breeze like this, and given the chance, she will spend hours doing so. Some days, it can be quite the task to get Kobe to come down once forest school has ended. Her caregivers even have had to harness their own climbing skills to scale up the trees to retrieve her. Kobe will slip onto her caregiver’s back and have a ride back to her sleeping enclosure.
It is clear Kobe feels most at home when she is in the Learning Forest which very much duplicates her natural, wild home. Over the coming months, she will spend even more time out in the forest, preparing for the day she will be permanently released into one of OFI’s protected forests.