The Orang -
Utan
Orang
- Utan is a long-armed, red-furred ape that lives in the warm, wet
forests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in south-east Asia. It
looks like a man in many ways. So it is named orang-utan, which means
'man of the woods'.
Orang-utans belong to
the gorilla family. They are not as big as the gorillas. An adult
orang-utan is about one and half meters tall. They spend most of their
time in the trees in search of fruits, leaves, insects, buds, bird's
eggs and bark to eat. At night they make nests made of branches to
sleep in. They build roofs to their nests to protect themselves from
rain.
Orang-utans are in danger
only because of people. People are cutting down the forests where
they live and people hunt the orang-utans. The hunters kill the mothers
and sell the babies to the zoos. But most babies die because
the hunters do not know how to take care of the babies.
The giant panda
Giant
pandas live in the forests of China. Outside China they are seen only
in zoos. When it's born a baby panda is very tiny. It weighs only
140 grams. The mother panda cradles and strokes her baby and plays
with it.
They eat only
one kind of food - bamboo shoots, and lots of them. But there are
not always enough bamboo plants to be found. Every hundred years the
bamboo plants produce seeds and die. It then takes several years for
the seeds to grow. By the time the plants are big enough to
eat, many giant pandas have died of starvation.
Keeping a panda in a
zoo is difficult because it must have bamboo shoots to eat and it
is difficult to get giant pandas to have a baby in a zoo.
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