Jakarta – A rare albino orangutan has been rescued after being caught by residents in the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, a conservation group said Wednesday.
The female orangutan has been under the care of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation at its rehabilitation centre near the city of Palangka Raya since Saturday, the group's spokesman Nico Hermanu said.
"It was caught by residents and kept in a cage for two days before local authorities intervened and handed it over to us," Hermanu said.
The white-haired and blue-eyed primate, thought to be five-years-old, was healthy even though there were signs he had been involved in a fight, he said.
It was the first albino orangutan to be cared for by the organisation in its 25-year-old history, Hermanu said.
"Orangutans are rare and albino orangutans are even rarer," he said.
Recent estimates showed that there are between 45 000 and 65 000 orangutans in Indonesia's wild, though those numbers could have fallen due to rapid deforestation.