A wild world

Tigers can be found in the fauna-rich forests here- file picture
Tigers can be found in the fauna-rich forests here- file picture

FROM tigers to tapir, more than half the mammal species found in the country are present in Ulu Muda area.
Studies and surveys from a scientific expedition to the Ulu Muda Forest Reserve in March 2003 also found that these forests host six of 10 primate species and 42 of 54 reptile species.

The dense jungles are home to 78 % squirrel species, 53 percent bat species, 175 bird species, seven out of 10 hornbill species.

Scientists also found myriad river and lake fish and herds of elephants which make the reserve a major reservoir for wildlife.

The reserve itself is over 100,000 ha in size and is spread of the Sik, Padang Terap and Baling districsts, adjacent to Thailand in the northeast and Perak in the south.
The national importance of the Ulu Muda complex of forests was first highlighted by a WWF proposal for a Kedah Conservation Strategy in 1984, say papers in Hutan Simpan Ulu Muda, Kedah: Pengurusan, Persekitaran Fizikal dan Biologi, a publication of findings during the 2003 survey.

The area was also been identified as a critical area for conservation under the Economic Planning Unit's Malaysian National Conservation Strategy in 1993.

The strategy recommended that Ulu Muda be protected as a National or State park.

It has also been proposed as trans-frontier protected area as it lies on the Thai-Malaysia border.

In 1996, the National Ecotourism Plan recognized Ulu Muda as a potentially important nature tourism destination.

The forest here is also a storehouse of medical plants with surveys of just small sections uncovering about 56 species.

Orang utans to be extinct in 50 years

KOTA KINABALU: Sabah’s isolated orang utan population in lower Kinabatangan may become extinct in 50 years if no steps are taken urgently to set up wildlife corridor between fragmented forests.

Scientific journal Oryx in its latest publication said although the Kinabatangan population of 1,100 orang utans was more then enough for their survival but many of them were separated into small pockets of less then 250 animals.

It says much more work needs to be carried out to ensure the survival of the orang-utan. It also stresses that that the “pockets” of orang-utan population need a minimum number of 250 orang-utan individuals to survive in the long term.

“It is essential that conservation measures are taken to protect orang-utans outside national parks, and these measures will by necessity be specific to each region,” Oryx wrote in the newly released paper entitled “Distribution and conservation status of the orang-utan on Borneo and Sumatra: How many remain?”

Conservationists and scientists from 16 institutions, including Hutan, a French NGO, wrote the paper.

The Sabah Wildlife Department and Hutan have been studying orang-utan occurrence in protected and unprotected areas for a number of years.

Together with their partners they have engaged the landowners such as the Sabah Foundation, the Sabah Forestry Department as well as private landowners (mostly palm oil companies) in developing innovative conservation strategies to address the issue of orang-utans in unprotected areas.

Genetic modelling carried out by conservation geneticist Dr. Benoit Goossens of Cardiff University and Dr. Isabelle Lackman-Ancrenaz of HUTAN had shown that the majority of the isolated orang-utan populations in the Kinabatangan would go extinct in less than 50 years if nothing is done to reconnect the populations.

“Having ‘wildlife corridors’ linking isolated lots of forest that are home to orang-utan as well as other wildlife such as the Bornean pygmy elephants, are absolutely crucial to ensure that this wildlife continues to exist in the Kinabatangan,” said Dr Ancrenaz.

The paper also shows a study that reassessed orang-utan populations in Borneo and now finds that an estimated 75 percent of orang-utans in Kalimantan occur outside protected areas.


The Sabah Wildlife Department had in 2004 with HUTAN published a paper in the scientific journal, PLoS Biology that showed that 60 percent of orang-utans in Sabah live outside protected areas. The study was funded by the Danish International Development Agency (Danida).

It was a landmark paper for the world of orang-utan conservation as up to that point scientists in other areas of Borneo and Sumatra (the only two places in the world the orang-utan survive in the wild) were mostly studying and working on orang-utan populations within primary forests which were almost all protected areas, such as national parks.


Hutan has been working together with the Sabah Wildlife Department to develop and implement solutions to conserve the orang-utan in Sabah, Malaysia for the past 10 years.