SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The endangered orangutans of Borneo are holding on, but just barely. This year's super El Nino has made Indonesia extra hot and dry, and wildfires have burned 2.2 million acres of land this season.
JAMARTIN SIHITE: And it's destroyed the orangutan habitat, orangutan home.
SIMON: That's Jamartin Sihite, chairman of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, trying to pull orangutans to safety away from the fires and smoke. Huge swaths of orangutan habitats are burning.
SIHITE: If I look at the maps from the fire and the map from the population of orangutan in the forest, I thought more than 50 to 60% of the habitat of orangutan now getting burned or at least got impact from the smoke.
SIMON: The humans who are breathing the smoke will be vulnerable to asthma, heart attacks and even a shortened life expectancy, and orangutans, who share so much of our DNA, face the same health crises.
SIHITE: Like a human, acute respiratory infection. This is the biggest problems now for human and for the orangutan.
SIMON: He says that at least humans can wear masks on our own. Orangutans cannot. Sihite's organization is one of several in the area working to rescue and rehabilitate orangutans who are being affected by wildfires. They ran a similar rescue operation in 2015 when massive forest and peatland fires burned inside Indonesia.
Wendy Erb is a biological anthropologist who specializes in primate behavior. She's watching these fires from Ithaca, New York, but in 2015, she was in a field station in Borneo studying orangutan behavior.
WENDY ERB: My very favorite orangutan showed up in front of camp, and I couldn't resist just spending one more day with him. So I extended my stay by a day, and then that day turned into an extension of a month as the fires decided to pop up in our study area that very day that I was supposed to leave.
SIMON: Like many who are fighting today's fires, Erb and her team dug small wells into the ground that could be used with a generator to pump water up from several meters below the peatland, till finally, a month in, they got enough rain to put out the fires and to flee. But even when the fires are gone, Sihite says the survival struggle is not over.
SIHITE: After the fire, we still face the problems in the forest. We will face, like, scarcity of food because there is no pollination. There is no fruit.
SIMON: Sihite's team rescued a 5-year-old female orangutan called Novita last month. Novita was found in the forest canopy surrounded by smoke and flame. Twenty percent of her body was burned, including her hands and feet. She was treated with a nebulizer to help her breathe and is now recovering at a rehabilitation center.
How many like Novita still need help? Rescue agencies have pulled dozens of orangutans out of danger, including multiple mothers with infants and young males who had been stranded. They are still trying to figure out how to help the 104,000 Borneo orangutans that are left in Indonesia. There is no doubt that the fires are destructive, but Erb believes the orangutans will find a way to survive.
ERB: Because orangutans are quite resilient and pretty flexible, as well as incredibly intelligent and ecologically resourceful, they really can sort of make a go at even a pretty degraded habitat.
SIMON: That's biological anthropologist Wendy Erb, who studies orangutan behavior at Cornell University. We also heard from Jamartin Sihite, chairman of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation.
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