Just 10 days after giving birth, Soga ventured out into the morning sunshine, clamped a sheet in her left foot, and with her baby clinging onto her neck, used her two arms to shimmy up a rope to a high hammock.

There, she settled down and pulled the sheet over her head to mimic the leaves that would have naturally covered her in the forests of Borneo.

Tiny Cayaha, which means ‘light’ in Indonesian, who weighed around a kilogram (2.2 pounds) at birth, is the first orangutan to be born at Jerusalem’s Biblical Zoo. He will stay with his mom for the next seven to nine years, during which Soga will not have any other offspring.

Zoo handlers are not sure which of the two orangutan males there is the father, but suspect it is Ito, aged 20, rather than Kesato, just 15.

Male orangutans are not involved in raising their young, but Soga has already shown the newcomer off to the males.

“We are so excited,” said Lior Luzon, head of the Zoo’s carnivore department, who is also responsible for the orangutans.

Female orangutans reach sexual maturity at 10 to 15 years. Soga, 13, gave birth as part of a European zoo breeding program.

Orangutans, which live around 35 years in the wild and up to 50 years in zoos, hail from the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia, but today survive only in parts of Sumatra and Borneo.

Illegally traded as pets, hunted, and facing shrinking forest habitats thanks to logging, climate-related fires, and the replacement of forests with oil palm groves, they are now critically endangered.

As Luzon explained, without the forest, they simply cannot survive.

The zoo has two large enclosures for orangutans, which, in the wild, are often........

© The Times of Israel