Welcome to our Save Wild Orangutans Team! We are excited that you are joining us on this quest to safeguard wild orangutans.
My name is Tim Laman. I’m lucky enough to be the husband of orangutan researcher Cheryl Knott. We met back in the early 90’s when we were both grad students at Harvard University, and we both did our PhD research in the rain forest of Borneo. I gradually moved more into photography and filmmaking, but Cheryl has continued her orangutan research she started as a grad student. About twenty years ago, seeing the increasing pressures on orangutans and their rain forest habitat in and around Gunung Palung, she started a conservation project. This project has grown into the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program (GPOCP), which is known as Yayasan Palung in Indonesia, with an amazing team of over 25 Indonesian staff members.
Our team in Borneo is accomplishing a lot, but if we can grow the organization, there is so much more we could do. That’s where you come in. Through the power of social media, our idea is to share our work with Team members from around the world who care about the future of orangutans in the wild. This Save Wild Orangutans initiative is a brand new effort for 2020, so we are just getting started, but our plan is to share monthly posts that include an insiders look at our field work with wild orangutans in Gunung Palung, and all the related conservation efforts our team is involved in.
There will be a lot more to come for those of you who become members of our team, but here are a couple things you can check out if you’d like to learn more about orangutans and our work in Borneo.
My most recent National Geographic magazine article on Orangutans focused on the fact that orangutans have unique cultural traditions that are passed on between generations. Most of the photography for this story was done at Gunung Palung, and you can read the article here: Out on a Limb: Inside the Private Lives of Orangutans.
Finally, we have some exciting news about media coverage of Gunung Palung. I was one of the photographers working on the filming of the BBC’s newest Landmark Series called SevenWorlds, One Planet, and we filmed an orangutan sequence for the Asia episode. It is already out in the UK, and can be viewed on the BBC’s iplayer. In North America, the Asia episode is premiering on Feb 8, 2020 on BBC America. We are also featured in the behind-the-scenes segment at the end of the film so please check it out.
Thanks for your support! Together we can make a real difference for orangutans and the rainforest of Borneo!
Tim Laman, PhD
PS. If you’d like to learn more about Cheryl’s or my work, please check out our websites: