Can you see the baby clinging to mother's chest under her left arm?
The pictures of this sequence from WWF are not high quality but they depict an amazing and intense moment that happened a few days ago in the Malaysian island of Borneo. This is a story about the courage of a desperate mother and also about the help some good men gave to an endangered animal (at last!).
The photographs taken by local officials of the WWF caught the moment when a terrified Orang-Utan mother caught a rope thrown to her by humans and swam across a flooded river to bring her baby to safety.
The mother grabbing the rope
The mother and her baby were stranded in a tree when a river flooded on the north east tip of the island and got trapped there for several days. Finally the villagers decided to ask for help and The Sabah Wildlife Department, which is linked to WWF, sent a team to the area. They set up a rope bridge so they could get close to the hungry mother and baby but once they were there it seemed there was no way to take them back to safety. Orang-Utans are terrified by water, even when it rains they scamper for shelter. As a last impossible try, they threw the mother a rope to cling on to so she could swim to the nearest river bank and unbelievably she reached out and grabbed it and in an unbelievable scene she climbed down the tree, with the baby on her back, and slipped into the water, clinging to the rope, and ensuring the baby's head was above the water, she dog-paddled towards the river bank and scrambled up taking her baby finally to safety. The officials gave her some food and then the mother and the baby disappeared into the jungle.
She finally took the plunge and dog-paddled through the water to safety
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