Eavesdropping on Orangutans

Author:

Great Big Story

Keywords:

great big story,gbs,lag,documentary,docs,nature & animals,nature,animals,new releases,planet earth,Orangutans,Indonesia,forest,trees,science,animal,preservation,conservation,indonesia,Borneo,Kalimantan Rainforest,The Nature Conservancy,wildlife,Dr. Eddie Gam,sounds,listening,birds,frogs,climate,mining,logging

Subtitles:

the rainforest home to this noise and believe it or not these sounds may be the key to saving it welcome to the callee mantan rainforests of Borneo Indonesia one of the most biodiverse places on the planet this is dr. Eddie game his job is focusing on how to use technology to understand the damage that mining and logging is doing to the rainforest how well by listening to it bio acoustic monitoring is essentially just using the sounds we hear from the environment as a measure of environmental health yeah busy arist or any other kind of environment it's lots of animals making noise think food insects frogs very vocal ones that you hear are primates from the mammal side the team uses a bio acoustic monitor it's basically a smart microphone they then have to track ours through the forest deploying around 20 devices in a day we deploy them through a lot of the forests of Borneo are usually very mountainous very steep very wet and there are no tracks where we're putting them so most of the time it's just us sort of slogging through the forest until we find a place where we want to quit and then we literally strap it to a tree and set it to record and walk away because the rain forest is so dense it's almost impossible to track all the creatures at any given time which is why Eddy listens to the sounds [Music] the soundscape is as we start to degrade environments chopping down trees clearing areas things like that hunting with losing species and we see those gaps appear in the soundscape when we measure the team will then talk to forestry companies and communities and provide guidance on the best way to continue logging safely in Indonesia what we want to make sure is that we get the best conservation outcome possible when you're actually inside these forests and Rebecca tall and they're dark and they're very noisy it often surprises people to just have no easier healthy forests is you usually think of nature as somewhere that's a place of a quietness or stillness then that's true in certain circumstances putting your in and prime healthy rainforests one of the things that really is an assault on the senses is just how continuously noisy [Music]