Tuesday, July 18, 2017
By Olivia Miwil
olivia@nst.com.my
KINABATANGAN: The sight of an orang-utan eating fruits in the world inspired a doctor to make it his personal mission to preserve nature in the heart of Sabah.
Based at the Kuamut Health Clinic in Tongod here, Dr Chok Au Bo said seeing the orang utan eating in its habitat made him realise it was way better than watching the rare species in a cage.
The 30-year-old medical doctor from Tawau said since the experience a few years ago, he began getting involved conservation works through a group called the Borneo Explorer Group and local communities.
Since last year, the club and a community based cooperative from Kampung Batu Puteh, Koperasi Pelancongan Mukim Batu Puteh Berhad (Kopel), have begun regular tree-planting and lake-restoration activities in several locations in the Lower Kinabatangan area here.
“When we approached Kopel in March last year, we proposed to help plant 2,000 trees in a year,” he said adding Kopel was established in 1999 and has replanted over 300,000 trees on a 900ha area here.
“The following month until now, we lost count on how many were planted,” he quipped but assured there’s more to come from them.
“For me in each trip I would travel by boat about six hours from Tongod, pass through Bukit Garam before reaching the Kopel hostel by night,” Dr Chok said.
In each trip, mostly weekend when they are not at work, they would plant several hundred trees.
“The following day we would take another boat ride or trek to planting sites. Sometimes, when the weather is bad we would have to trek through muddy trail to reach the sites,” he said.
“Kinabatangan (forest) was badly burnt in the 1980s, 1997, and last year. It is also affected by logging activities and land clearing for plantations which destroy wildlife habitat,” he said.
The Kinabatangan wetlands area is also important for the Proboscis monkey as the species is dependent on the habitat for food and shelter.
Besides tree-planting, the group is also engaged in restoration work at some of the lakes within Lower Kinabatangan which requires them to remove Salvinia molesta, an invasive weed species, using hands and nets.
The species has to be removed from the aquatic biodiversity as it will cause localised extinction to fish, otter species and a host of rare water birds that thrive on the lake.
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