Secret Orangutan Hideout Found

Score one for the great apes. During a survey of a remote forest in Indonesia, ecologists from the Nature Conservancy discovered a pocket of orangutans that numbers as many 2,000, the Associated Press reports. The discovery is heartening—there are only 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, and they are among the world's most endangered species. (Though the orangutans were not so keen to be found—one male “angrily threw branches as [journalists] tried to take photos.”) Ninety percent of them live in Indonesia, with the remainder dwelling in nearby Malaysia. In recent years, the great apes' habitat has been shrinking as rain forests are burnt and clear cut to make way for palm oil plantations. As a bonus, the cache of apes is a rare subspecies—the black Borneon orangutan.