Kalimantan 2010 Qtr 4

KALIMANTAN, BORNEO
Fourth Quarter Report – Year 2010
October – November – December

Wildlife Protection, Habitat Restoration & Community Wellbeing

1. New Year appeal

Please consider making a donation to help fund FNPF’s project in Kalimantan

2. Quarterly Highlights

  • FNPF’s manager in Kalimantan is awarded “Youth Environment Pioneer” by the Indonesian Youth National Committee
  • FNPF’s “Corridor Project” in Lamandau Reserve is now fully active
  • FNPF participates in “One Billion Indonesian Trees for The World”
  • Primary school students become FNPF Ambassadors for Tree Planting
  • Organic Agro-forestry project wins more followers

3. Regular quarterly updates

  • Wildlife Protection
  • Habitat Restoration
  • Community Wellbeing

NEW YEAR APPEAL

Please support us by inviting friends and colleagues to donate to FNPF. You can donate to FNPF directly via our web site here.

Or you can donate via our Australian partner organisation, Humane Society International on their web site here. Please specify “YES” that you are contributing to a specific campaign, and enter “Support for FNPF” as the name of the campaign.

  • $20 will purchase a bag of seeds for our nursery to grow thousands of saplings
  • $25 will fund a child to attend highschool for 1 month
  • $50 will plant 10 saplings and receive 3 years post planting maintenance (water, mulch, protection from fires)
  • $120 will employ 1 local person to work in the nursery or bird centre for 1 month

Quarterly Highlights

FNPF’s manager in Kalimantan awarded “Youth Environment Pioneer” by the Indonesian Youth National Committee

In recognition of strong dedication to conservation, FNPF’s manager in Kalimantan, Basuki Budi Santoso, has been awarded “Youth Environment Pioneer” (“Pemuda Pelopor Lingkungan”) by the Indonesian Youth National Committee. This award was given in conjunction with “The Youth Pledge” (“Sumpah Pemuda”) celebration on 28th October 2010, an important celebration about the nation unification. The pledge was started for the first time on 28 October 1928.

FNPF’s Borneo Manager, Basuki Budi Santoso, “Youth Environment Pioneer”

FNPF’s “Corridor Project” in Lamandau Reserve is now fully active

The 40 Hectare reforestation project is to create corridors of trees between existing patches of native forest. Depending on the patches of forest, the corridors will range in width between 30m to 100m wide.

Nursery at Lamandau Reserve

The project, that is being funded by SIES (Save Indonesian Endangered Species) in Australia, and the (Eco Future Fund) from Japan, has been fully operating since November. All of the facilities, such as base camp with office, nursery and water facility (well, pump, and tower with tank) have been constructed and are fully operational. For the first year the work will focus on producing 16,000 native tree saplings to be planted in the next rainy season (Nov 2011 – April 2012).

FNPF participates in “One Billion Indonesian Trees for The World”

On November 28 2010, with the Tanjung Puting National Park authorities, FNPF participated in the “One Billion Indonesian Trees for the World”. The park sponsored 23 conservation cadets from highschool in Pangkalan Bun and FNPF sponsored 33 cadets from the primary school in Sekonyer village. The two groups planted 1,500 Kerantungan (Durio ocleyanus) saplings at the Beguruh reforestation site. Even though their age is quite different they worked very well together and learned about the reforestation site.

High school and Primary school students planting tree at the same site

The highschool cadets gave inspiration to the primary school cadets to continue their activities in the future and were amazed by how much the primary school cadets knew about conservation at such a young age and being in such an isolated location. The Sekonyer village primary school is located very close to the National Park, and the FNPF conservation education is now part of their curriculum.

Thank you to the HSI (Australia) for funding this project.

Primary school students become FNPF Ambassadors for Tree Planting

The primary school students at Sekonyer Village, where FNPF has been providing conservation education for many years, have become FNPF Ambassadors for Tree Planting to a primary school, called Sungai Kumai Seberang, located in the main harbour town of Kumai.

Prior to an inter-school sport event in December, FNPF and a teacher at from the Sekonyer Village primary school saw a very good opportunity to spread conservation education idea to schools in Kumai, which are not so close to the National Park (FNPF has been unable to expand the conservation education program to students in the town of Kumai because of limited staff numbers and funds). So we used this inter-school sporting event as a starting point to spread the conservation message to the town students.

3 staff members from FNPF accompanied the Sekonyer village primary school to the sports match, and took a variety of native species saplings. Before the sport match FNPF staff gave a simple lecture about conservation, organized for all the children to participate in games with a conservation content, and then finished by having the children plant the saplings in the school yard. The sports match followed.

Students from two schools planting tree around the school area

From this first visit to Sungai Seberang primary school we received a very good response from the children and staff. They showed that they want FNPF to offer a conservation education program at their school. This is a financial challenge for FNPF. Hopefully we will able to find more funds and to train staff in Kumai to assist us with this.

Special thanks to HSI (Australia) for funding the conservation education project to date.

Please contact us if you would like to help FNPF to expand the conservation education programme into more schools.

Organic Agro-forestry project wins more followers

Some of the hard wood trees, such as Agar wood (Gaharu) and Rubber, have shown excellent growth in the Jerumbun pilot project area. This is attracting more and more local people to want to participate in this type of agro-forestry. Some of the locals have now started create an alternative income by growing and then selling saplings of these trees to other villages who have heard about the agro-forestry programme. The most popular tree is the Agar wood. FNPF has 2 staff actively in charge of this project.

Many thanks to the Global Great Green Fund for providing finances to FNPF to run this programme.

Local people nursery

Two cows have a good life in Jerumbun

Free range chicken nest with eggs

Free range chicken with chicks

Regular Quarterly Updates

Wildlife

Orangutan

We have had no specific rescue activities with orangutans during this quarter. This can be viewed as a positive result, because it means that no orangutans (or other endangered species) were seen by the locals in the palm-oil plantations or being kept in cages as pets. We are confident that the very good relationship we have with local villages means that they will continue to contact us if any endangered wildlife is seen outside of the National Park, and that they will assist us to move the wildlife to the safety of the National Park, as occurred on a number of occasions in the previous quarter.

Turtles

Our turtle hatchery on the south coast region of Tanjung Puting National Park is currently dormant because of lack of funds. For 2 years we were able to protect turtle eggs from being stolen (dogs, pigs and fishermen) from 2km of active turtle nesting beach. Local villagers patrolled the beach and turtle eggs were collected and placed into our hatchery where we hatched them in safety. The hatchlings were then released into the ocean via a temple ceremony. Involvement of the temple priest helps to communicate the importance of protecting the turtles to the local community members. The village community is keen to work with us again on this project. But we need funds. The cost to run the project for the first year is approximately US$9,000, and then US$7,000 for each subsequent year.

Please contact us if you would like to support FNPF in re-activating the turtle hatchery project, or if you know of an organisation looking for a project for its CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) fund.

Habitat Restoration

Forest restoration – Pesalat site

This site is approximately 48 Hectares. Our past donors include US Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of Environment & Heritage (DEH) Australia, and a number of private donors. The funds for current operations are coming from HSI (Australia).

Project commenced in 2000. The main planting activity is completed, with approximately 400 saplings planted per Hectare, totalling over 19,200 trees, and over 70% survival rate. This site has now become the location for an education and camping site for tourists visiting Tanjung Puting National Park. The authorities have selected this site because it provides the best example of forest restoration work in the national park. FNPF has been engaged by the park authorities to continue its maintenance of reforestation area, plus assist with the operation of the education centre. Hence our staff continue to work on the site, plating additional saplings, patrolling for fire, as well as provide assistance to the tourists.

Pesalat when we started 2000

Pesalat after about 5 years

Our activities during this quarter included:

  • Collection of more iron wood seed (Ulin tree) to produce iron wood saplings
  • Assisting the park management to look after conservation camping centre and running conservation education seminars
  • Planting 5 – 10 saplings per day to increase the number and biodiversity in this area
  • Informing visitors and tourists to the park about conservation and our work
  • Patrolling, especially in case of fires

Special thanks to HSI (Australia) for providing the operational costs to continue the forest restoration project in Pesalat.

Forest restoration – Beguruh site

This restoration site has now grown to approximately 200 Hectares, due to the additional 80 Hectares of swamp wetland restoration. The first 40 Hectares of swamp wetland began in 2009 / 10 with funding by Tarronga Zoo and HSI (Australia). The second 40 Hectares of swamp wetland commenced late 2010, with funding by Boeing Aerospace and HSI (Australia). Our past donors include Dept of Envt & Heritage (DEH) Australia, Hutan Group, HSI (Australia), and a number of private donors.

Many thanks to all our donors, past and present. And an extra special thanks to Boeing Aerospace for supporting FNPF. This is the first time that Boeing Aerospace has selected a conservation NGO in SE Asia.

Original 120 Hectares of dry land

  • Monitoring and fire patrol. Our activities during the quarter focused on monitoring the site and replacing dead saplings with new ones.

40 Hectares of swamp wetland Tarronga Zoo & HSI (Australia)

  • Monitoring and replacement of dead saplings
  • We discovered that many saplings had been destroyed by wild pigs. The wild pigs are using the planting rows as corridors to travel to one patch of existing forest to another. The planting site is designed to create corridors of trees between the forest areas, but we did not expect that the wild pigs to use the corridors for their travel, especially at this stage when the saplings are still so young and small.

The damage by wild pig

40 Hectares swamp wetland – Boeing Aerospace and HSI (Australia).

  • FNPF staff supervised the Sekonyer Lestari nursery cooperative group to assist with preparing our next major restoration project on 40 Hectares of swamp wetland. They helped FNPF to build a nursery right next to the planting site so that we can grow the saplings at the planting site location and have a source of saplings on-hand, instead of growing and then carrying them 7km from the nursery located in the village. The objective will be to grow over 20,000 saplings in the nursery in the first year, of which we will select about 16,000 to plant. We then continue to grow additional saplings in the nursery for the 3 years to provide replacements to the saplings that have been planted and die.
  • FNPF staff and the Sekonyer Lestari cooperative group continued to collect seeds and seedlings for the nursery.
  • We had difficulty finding the seedling of Blangeran (Shorea belangerans) because the park management did not allowed us yet to collect from the forest near by the planting site. So rather than wait to work through the bureaucracy to receive formal approval from the park authorities, we collected the seeds and seedlings from our other working site in Lamandau reserve and brought them to the nursery in Buguruh.

Nursery that will produce sapling for Boeing and HSI (Australia) Project

Staff collecting seeds from forest near by

Additional 2 Hectares – Japanese tourist

  • Adjacent to the 40 Hectare planting, site the Sekonyer Lestari cooperative group also planted 800 saplings on 2 Hectares of similar swamp land. The funding for this project was provided by a Japanese tourist who visited the park. The tourist donated $2,500 (3$ per sapling).

Fire patrols

The primary threat to the forest is fire, most often caused by fires that spread from farming areas into the park. A place called Padang Sembilan has for many years been a source of fire because the locals practice slash and burn farming. So in addition to patrolling, our staff spent time meeting with the local farmers and explaining the need to manage the fires to prevent them from spreading into the national park and destroying the forests. Our education and awareness programmes have helped the locals become much more aware of the importance of the forest, and now more clearly associate the extreme and frequent floods over the last year are a direct result of the removal of the nearby forests. We explain the benefits of mixed farming, and use our agro-forestry pilot project as a way of showing them an alternative to the traditional slash and burn approach.

Forest restoration – Lamandau Reserve

See above main quarterly highlight “FNPF’s “Corridor Project” in Lamandau Reserve is now fully active”

October

Our staff started to work on the office / base camp. The biggest problem was cost of materials and bringing building material to the site. It is very expensive in this remote location. And it was very difficult to deliver materials to our project site because there is no road. All of the material had to be carried by hand by our staff and hired labourers for about 500m, from the last place where a truck could access.

Staff and labour must carry the building material more than 500m from the last place where the truck can go

Novembser

We continued to work on completion of the main base camp infrastructure to make it fully operational. The construction work was mainly for toilet, roof, doors and windows and to build a well and water tower. Plus we started creating our local nursery that will produce the saplings that we plant.

Staff building our base camp at Lamandau reserve by the edge of the small forest

We want to get support and participation from the local community, in the same way that we do from the local villagers close to our project sites in Tanjun Puting National Park. So we have started “socializing” our project to the community close to the working site. This involves FNPF members explaining the purpose and the beneficial outcomes of the project to the community

From our forest restoration experience in Tanjung Puting National Park, we found that saplings produced from grafting grow faster and stronger on the dry land with poor soil quality, than saplings grown from seed. So we have started sapling production in the nursery by grafting tree branches from trees close to the base camp.

December

We continued to graft trees, especially the Ubar (Syzygium sp.) that we can find easily close to the base camp. We also continued to focus on do the socialization of the project to the local community near.

Many thanks to SIES (Save Indonesian Endangered Species) Australia who started the funding of this project, and to Eco Future Fund Japan for their additional support.

Grafting Ubar tree (Syzygium sp.) from the forest near by

Conservation education

October

For the first time in our conservation education programme, FNPF has involved students from the Junior High school in Sungai Cabang village. The village is about 6 hours away from Tanjung Puting National Park. The school had previously shown interest in our programme but FNPF’s budget had limited what we could do.

However, we decided to proceed with the programme to their school for 1 month. The village is quite isolated on the border of the park but they never seen what is going on at Tanjung Puting National Park as what visitor experience. We spent two days with them, showing them Sekonyer village, our reforestation site at Pesalat and Camp Leaky. There were about 40 participants that joined the programme, 23 students, 5 teachers and the rest were the village board members. During the visit we introduced them to our conservation work and had active discussions about many different subjects of conservation work. From this visit we hope the programme can be continued at their village.

On 12th – 14th October, FNPF and the park authority ran the programme to award a new group of interested young people to become “Conservation Cadets”. This is the 17th group that has been made “Conservation Cadets”. The activity included class lectures and a field visit to the Pesalat education centre where the cadets camped. The participants came from and Pangkalan Bun.

Our manager Basuki giving a lecture to the cadets

Novembser

As we mentioned in the Quarterly Highlight, we participated in the One Billion Indonesian Trees for The World.

December

On 18th December FNPF facilitated the primary school at Sekonyer village to have a sports match and tree planting day at Seberang primary school in the port town of Kumai (see Quarterly Highlight “Primary school students become FNPF ambassadors for Tree Planting”)

On 28th – 30th December, FNPF worked with the park authorities to facilitate the a camping event of Conservation Cadets at Pesalat. FNPF staff as usual gave lectures on land rehabilitation and other conservation subjects. Four of our staff were involved during this event. For the field work we brought the cadets to the area where we can still find very old large trees.

Thank you to HSI (Australia) for funding our Conservation Education programme.

Community Wellbeing / Development

Organic Farming & Agro Forestry Demonstration Plot – location Jerumbun

This project is being funded by that being funded by Global Great Green Fund USA.

October

Two of our staff built the cow and chicken pens. We bought 2 cows (one from Kumai and the other one from Sungai Cabang village). The cows will be one of the sources of organic fertilizer for the organic farm at the Demonstration plot.

Our staff continue to motivate farmers to do agro-forestry and organic farming and provide supervision and advise for this work.

We continued to work to help the Sekonyer Lestari Cooperative Group Nursery to be independent and provide an alternative income. We supervised them on how to organize the group, how to produce saplings, and how to plant and maintain saplings. We also keep promoting them to any 3rd parties who are interested in tree planting such as NGOs, government bodies, companies and tourists. The biggest work that they are focused on this month is preparing saplings for our next major planting project in the Beguruh area, 40 Hectares of swamp wetland that is being funded by Boeing Aerospace and HSI (Australia). We are working very hard to convince the government side (eg. Forestry Department) to support this group by buying sapling from them anytime the government has a planting event.

Transporting cow from Sungai Cabang to Jerumbun

November

We looked after the 2 cows that were acquired the previous month and started using waste as organic fertilizer. Semi intensive free range chicken project is running quite well.

Because of the strong interest in Agro-forestry from the local community, the staff spent a lot of time with the local farmers time to setting up the Agar wood sapling production. This is a direct and positive reflection of FNPF’s work to promote agro-forestry work to the locals, and the recognition that Agar wood plantation can provide a profitable return to the farmers in 5 – 7 years

December

We continue to provide assistance to the Sekonyer Lestari Cooperative Group with a particular focus on helping them to sell their saplings. In December, we helped them sell 1,500 saplings to YAYORIN (an Indonesian NGO), who use it for their community forestry project.

We also helped the group to develop their organisation and improve their product quality.

The cows got an insect attack that caused some little wounds on their skin and made the cows have less appetite. We suspect this insect has increased in population because of the weather pattern change, especially the extreme rains during 2010. We used lemon grass solution to spray the cow.

The free range chickens have started to breed and we keep trying to find a low cost local food source for the chickens to allow us to make this activity more profitable. The most delightful situation that we observed is that more and more local people in Sekonyer village are produce saplings of Agar wood on their own plots of land. Most of the locals get their seedling from the Pesalat site and our staff give them guidance on how to collect, plant and maintain the seedlings

However, we decided to proceed with the programme to their school for 1 month. The village is quite isolated on the border of the park but they never seen what is going on at Tanjung Puting National Park as what visitor experience. We spent two days with them, showing them Sekonyer village, our reforestation site at Pesalat and Camp Leaky. There were about 40 participants that joined the programme, 23 students, 5 teachers and the rest were the village board members. During the visit we introduced them to our conservation work and had active discussions about many different subjects of conservation work. From this visit we hope the programme can be continued at their village.

Others

November

Assist in determining the border between Sekonyer and Bedaun village

Assist the local government to form ecotourism cooperative at Sekonyer village. This will help strengthen the cooperative group that we formed previously.

Assist the ecotourism cooperative to get their supply such as tent, sleeping bag, mat and other supply for camping tour

December

Assisted the park management to do tree identification in the area call Natai Tengah for 4 days.

FNPF have some staff that are “traditional botanist and herbalist”. Hence we were asked by the park management to give a lecture on this subject to several villages at near the park

Two of our staff were involved directly with a village development program organised by the tourism department of local government to develop ecotourism at Sekonyer village


Comments are closed.