Did you know that ‘orangutan’ means ‘person of the forest?’ It’s a combination of two Malay/Indonesian words with ‘orang’ meaning ‘person’ and ‘hutan’ meaning ‘forest.’ Orangutans are physically built to live in trees and make their nests up high in the forest. Their diet consists of bark, leaves, flowers, insects and a lot of fruit.

They have a rather large range of area for their homes. Females settle down to raise offspring within a 3.5 square mile radius while the males’ territory may be up to 15 square miles. Male orangutans live a solitary lifestyle. Once they mature, they leave the nest in search of their own territory and then go on to find females who are ready to mate. They have mutually short romances, a week tops, only to procreate and then the males are back to Lonerville.

They are the slowest breeding primate, similar to humans, with a gestation period from 8 to 9 months. They also have long intervals between each offspring ranging from 7 to 10 years. Which leads to a female giving birth to approximately 3 babies in a lifetime (35-40 years in the wild) making them even more vital to the survival of the species.

Baby orangutans nurse until they are 6 or 7 years old. The longest dependence of any animal on its mother. This means the mama sleeps with the infant until she has another baby.  Can any of you mothers imagine doing that? Haha! No thank you!