Orkney girl’s Wallacea study aims to help protect crop-raiding monkeys
(From The Orcadian dated August 22, 2002)

Labundo on Buton Island, South Sulawesi, Indonesia was Gilly's home for six weeks during her time with Operation Wallacea.

After a 14-hour flight, a 12-hour ferry crossing and a two-hour bus journey I finally made it to the village of Labundo on Buton Island, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

This would be my home for the next six weeks. I stayed in a wooden house on stilts where the family slept in the back of the house and I and four other volunteers slept in the front. The village had 16 houses in total where volunteers and staff for Operation Wallacea would stay.

Operation Wallacea is an organisation dedicated to the conservation of rainforests and coral reefs and in so doing bringing income into the local community by employing locals as guides, cooks and general staff, paying rent for the houses that volunteers and staff stay in and then the volunteers contribute by paying their families to do their washing and buying products such as food and sarongs from their shops.

When we arrived it was the end of the rainy season so the rainforest was blooming with fruit and full of all types of vegetation and wildlife. During the first week, we ventured into the forest on a jungle training and survival course.

As I had arrived at the beginning of the Operation Wallacea season, I was part of a small group of volunteers consisting of just 12. With our heavy backpacks we trekked around the jungle for four days, sleeping in hammocks, which often got attacked by ants, and cooking dinner around campfires.

One of the Buton Macaque monkeys which Gilly followed and studied during her Operation Wallacea expedition.

The sounds that you hear in the jungle made by birds, insects, monkeys, pigs etc are so unique and often quite eerie. Every morning we got up at 5am and went on a two-hour walk before breakfast. We learned about which snakes and spiders were poisonous, which trees we could get water out of, what fruits to eat and so on. We also learned how to build shelters out of a local plant called Rattan, which was meant to make our roof waterproof. However this was not the case when we got caught in a rainstorm while spending our one and only night sleeping in them! We obviously needed more practice!

The following five weeks I spent working on my dissertation. My days were very long, as I had chosen to work with the Buton Macaque monkey. The macaques tend to get up when the sun rises and go to bed when the sun goes down. So every day I got up at 5am after being woken at 4.30am by the chickens which roosted under my house and made sure that I was at the macaques’ sleeping tree by 5.30am. I then followed them throughout the day recording their vocalisations and noting their general behaviour and daily routine. I would try and follow them until they reached their sleeping tree in the afternoon, normally by about 5pm. This is quite difficult, as the monkeys are always on the move and are often on the ground passing through thick vegetation so it is quite easy to lose them. Luckily I had a very good guide with me who seemed to always know where the monkeys were.

The sleeping tree of the Buton Macaque monkeys which Gilly studied during her time on Buton Island.

At the beginning you think that these monkeys are very cute and couldn’t do any harm to anyone. I spent a lot of time following monkeys in an area of forest at a neighbouring village called Kaweli. This village is very dependent on income from their farm produce. Unfortunately my group of macaques, as part of their daily routine, go and steel fruit from these farms and cost farmers a lot of money.

There are five groups of monkeys each consisting of 15-20 individuals which continuously crop raid in this area. This means that farmers have to form a 12 hour surveillance over their crop and therefore can’t go out and earn any money elsewhere. Things do become desperate and the result of this was that 11 monkeys out of the two groups that I followed were poisoned.

Unfortunately this is not a good method as the monkeys don’t understand why their relatives have died, as there has been no effect on them personally so no lesson is learned and they continue to crop raid. Therefore all the work that the volunteers and researchers do helps in the development of understanding the behaviour of the macaque monkey and thus aids in forming a plan to prevent farmers from losing so much of their livelihood and preserves this species of monkey.

I was sad to leave Sulawesi as I had made some good friends and had felt part of the local community. Even just playing with the children in the village and talking to the families you get to know what their life is like and how different it is from that to which we are used. With organisations such as Operation Wallacea, the few rainforests that we have left can be conserved, meaning that local communities can continue to survive as they have the local resources to do so.

Gilly (centre) with fellow volunteers on their last night in Labundo.

I would like to thank the people of Orkney who helped me to raise £1,000 towards my target of £3,000 and hence, enabled me to embark on an amazing expedition with Operation Wallacea to Indonesia. With the generous donations from friends and family; The Orcadian; Radio Orkney; A. J. B. Scholes; Offshore Oilfield Services Ltd; The Pickaquoy Centre; Alistair Carmichael MP; the staff of St Andrews Primary School and many others, I was able to fulfil my dream of observing animals in the wild.