However disturbing the statistics on the destruction of the rainforests in Borneo, watching it happen is infinitely more shocking, says Steve Leonard. “The speed at which the diggers flatten everything is unbelievable. It goes from being a lush green forest, cool and noisy, just this amazing variety of life, to it looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off.” And with it the last remaining habitat of the orangutan is instantly and brutally removed.

Leonard, the wildlife television presenter and vet, was in Borneo to film Orangutan Diary, the BBC’s record of the conservation work being done to support the threatened species, which is on every night this week. As the UN environment programme report, The Last Stand of the Orangutan: State of Emergency, says, the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra are being cleared so rapidly that by the early 2020s they are likely to have vanished. This means that unless urgent action is taken, their most charismatic inhabitant, the orangutan, will be extinct within five years.

The culprit is the palm oil industry which is responding to the worldwide enthusiasm for what is often described as vegetable oil. Its green credentials are impeccable: it can enhance a healthy diet, as a biofuel it can reduce carbon emissions, and its ubiquity in such products as margarine, cereals, soaps and shampoos makes it an important cash crop for Indonesia. But as the Government hands out permits for palm oil plantations – and illegal loggers remove valuable timber in most of the national parks – little is being done to protect the displaced species, Leonard says.

“A huge area of Borneo has been deforested already and there are millions of species possibly going to be lost – beetles, birds, other primates, mammals, reptiles – the whole lot, and the scale and speed of it is unbelievable. Whenever the companies were doing clearing operations we’d go to one of the plantations to help rescue some of the orangutans.

“They spray everything with herbicide, so you’ve got this scorched earth. They pile the remaining trees and everything into two big hedges – and who knows what’s underneath them. All we could see were birds thrashing in the sky in distress as their homes were destroyed, and you’re looking between your shoes and you see beetles crawling away with nowhere left to go. Every time I returned to the same spot in a plantation, within a matter of weeks the forest is on the horizon again, a 20-minute drive away. We have to start shouting about it because this area is going to disappear.”

The other focus of Leonard’s attention was the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, a rescue and conservation centre set up by Lone Droscher-Nielson, a Danish former air stewardess who gave up her job ten years ago to save the species. The Foundation’s aim is to rescue as many of the orangutans as possible, and ultimately to return them to a protected area of the wild.

Some are literally plucked from the forest as the bulldozers move in. But the problem of conserving them is exacerbated by the illegal trade in orphan animals: they are kept as pets and often illtreated. There is no census of how many creatures have been lost to deforestation, but it is estimated that for every orangutan that is rescued, five more have died.

Leonard’s skill with animals and televisual presence was first noted ten years ago in the BBC’s Vets School. Vets in Practice followed and he has since travelled around the world with the BBC Natural History Unit.

“I’ve always been fond of orangutans,” he says. “Chimps are a bit too aggressive and noisy, gorillas are sedate and regal but don’t do a great deal. Orangutans are inquisitive, there’s a real comedic aspect to them, they are very gentle, slow moving. But at the same time, because of the nature of the habitat they live in, they have to be a lot more inventive than their cousins from Africa. They live in a harsher environment, food is scarcer and they have to rely on their nous rather than hanging around in social groups where things are on tap.”

So far he has spent nine weeks in Borneo, engaged as a presenter and, in an unplanned capacity, as an emergency vet. The biggest procedure that came his way was the removal of the eye of an orangutan called Chenchen. The procedure was similar to many he has performed on domestic animals in his native Cheshire, but what surprised him, he says, was the response he got from his patient afterwards.

“I was able to reach in through the bars of his hospitalisation cage and stroke his head and have a look. He would pick bits of his bedding out, or bits of food, and slowly hand them out through the cage to me. Then he’d just want to hold my hand and it was weird for me to have that very human response in a patient-doctor relationship.

“It’s all fire brigade work at the moment, rushing in and rescuing and trying to find new homes. They’re like little orange refugees. They come in under a year in age, they are nursed back to health and then they’re put through school where a team of dedicated local women called the babysitters feed them, show them what plants to feed on in the forest, how to find water – all the things they would have learnt during their nine-year childhood with their mother.

“There’s a lot of scepticism about whether it’s possible to rehabilitate them, but it’s not going to be possible if nobody tries. The first wave of rehabilitation may not work, but every time we do this we stand a chance of learning more about it.”

This week Leonard returns to Borneo to watch the first of the orphans being released. “Lone said, you’ll fall in love with one, and for me that was Grendon. He was a 2½-year-old who was already at the centre, he looked like Homer Simpson, was about as bright and made me laugh every time I spent time with him in the forest. The babysitters knew every single ape by name, what they needed, what they liked, which ones needed a bit more comfort, more food, which ones liked to be left alone.

“You can’t help but pick up on their different personalities; they really do have incredibly individual traits. So we get to see these really cute characters. But there are very sad moments too and we don’t shy away from that.”

Steve Leonard’s Orangutan Diary is broadcast daily until Friday from 6pm-7pm on BBC One. www.savetheorangutan.org.uk

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