WORLD ORANGUTAN DAY!!

WORLD ORANGUTAN DAY!!!

We’re celebrating some orange apes today! These amazing great apes call Asia home. They are amazingly intelligent and have culture! These special creatures that we share the planet with are losing their homes at an alarming rate! We’re going to tell you why you should love them and how you can help!

Some of the food orangutans eat!

• Orangutans are great apes.
• There are two species, the Bornean and the Sumantran.
• Orangutans are solitary in the wild.
• Orangutans are arboreal (spend most of their lives in trees.)
• They are frugivores.
• Orangutans are highly intelligent.
• Baby orangutans stay with their mothers for around 8 years, the longest of any primate.
• Orangutans have extremely long arm spans, up to 7 feet from finger tips to finger tips.
  
• Orangutans’ feet are built just like hands and help them climb in the trees.

We love those faces. Orangutans are losing their precious forest homes due to palm oil plantations. Palm oil is used in many products and food. It is very hard to avoid totally. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo has a wonderful resource for consumers to use. They have a list of products that use palm oil that is produced in a sustainable manner and is not taking over orangutans homes. This resource is a great tool to help orangs! Visiting your local zoo and learning more about these apes is a great way to help! Our local zoo, Zoo Atlanta does some fantastic research with orangutans. They are learning to use computers!

Check out the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo website. They even have a nifty app you can take with you when you are shopping!

Learn more about Zoo Atlanta’s Orangutan Learning Tree Project! They are doing some amazing work! We’ll be participating in the Redhead Run here in Atlanta to support orangutans too!