Word: wildness
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...Schaik, seeking to find that control group of orangutans to answer those great questions about men and monkeys that could only be answered here in the wild, crossed the Simpang-kiri river, persuading the illegal loggers to give him rides through unending kilometers of rotting stumps and splintered branches. He was just a tourist, he told them, but had they by any chance seen any neesia trees still upright? He finally hit pay dirt in August of 1999. "On our last trip in," the lanky Van Schaik recounts, "the loggers said, yes, there are a few crooked trees left that...
...rather forlorn hope. Behind Shumaker a group of hooting subadolescent orangutans chases one another around a large cage, one of a series of such enclosures in which the 200 or so orangutans inhabiting this rehabilitation center live for five years as they are prepared for release into the wild. There are two other such programs releasing apes into Borneo's dwindling forests...
...even if the programs are successful?and scientists say the chances are as low as one in five?the orangutans that graduate are very different from their wild cousins. In the forest, orangutans spend eight years under the exclusive tutelage of their mothers, learning to distinguish among 4,000 different plants, absorbing the details of location and fruiting time of every tree in a 100-hectare range. And, yes, probably learning how to use certain types of tools, even if they haven't all solved the problem of gaining access to the fruits of the neesia tree...
...teem with a sort of secret Shakespearean life. I browse through field guides to wildflowers and weeds, and when I read them, I feel as if I have rediscovered a rich, hidden vein of the English language-a parallel universe populated by such vivid protagonists as Carrion Flower and Wild Bleeding Heart, as Vipers Bugloss and Crazyweed, as Hog Peanut, Corn Cockle, Tansy leaf Aster, Showy Orchis, Death Camas, and that damned elusive Scarlet Pimpernel...
...names savor of medicinal witcheries and faery mythologies. Weeds are infinitely more interesting in their way than mere pampered uptown flowers, those sleek, over bred showdogs. You can boil the wild weeds, eat them, put them on wounds. Their names are surrounded by an atmosphere of gossip. What goes on between Pokeweed and Bluebead Lilly? The groundlings-or groundhogs- want to know. What conspiratorial dialogue is whispered between Blue Toad flax and Monkshood? What soliloquies from Trumpet Creeper, from Lady's Thumb, from the grizzled Salt-Marsh Fleabane...