Picture post: Look again - an orang-utan's eye view

If you'd been blind for 10 years and woke up one morning to find your sight had returned, this might well be exactly the sort of face you'd make.

Aman, a 20-year-old orang-utan from Kubah National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia, recently became the first of his species to benefit from bilateral cataract surgery. After a decade in the dark, the big fella's sight is back, and he's ready to shout about it.

Aman is presently enjoying a period of rest and recuperation at the park's Matang Wildlife Centre, a conservation project that rehabilitates captured and injured orang-utans and releases them back into the wild. Orang-utans, or "people of the forest", are among the planet's most endangered mammals. One of mankind's closest relatives, they share 96.4 per cent of our gene pool, but are found only in the forests of Sumatraand Borneo (of which Sarawakis a part).

The species is under threat from poachers, who regularly kill adult orang-utans before selling their babies as pets or zoo animals, and from palm oil farmers, who have destroyed much of the animal's natural habitat to make way for plantations. Used in many consumer products in the developed world, palm oil's production is a significant income source for approximately two million of the rural poor in Malaysia and Indonesia. Unfortunately, it also contributes to the rapid decline of the Sumatran tiger and the Asian rhinoceros.

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