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This is a guest blog from SOS Ambassador Zac Mills, The Wildlife Collective.
Thirteen years ago, on my very first trip to Sumatra, I met an orangutan named Pesek. She was the first orangutan I had ever seen.
I still remember it clearly. That moment when the forest opened just enough, and there she was, with her young baby clinging to her side. Calm. Present. Completely at home in a world I was only just beginning to understand. There was something about her immediately. A steadiness. An intelligence in her eyes that felt… knowing. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I do now. She wasn’t just another sighting. She was the beginning of something.
Credit: Zac Mills, the Wildlife Collective
Since then, I’ve returned to Sumatra again and again. This last trip, in March, was my thirteenth. And somehow, impossibly, it came full circle.
The very first orangutan we saw on this trip was Pesek. Not just Pesek. Pesek, at 42 years old, heavily pregnant.
You could see it in the way she moved. Slower, more deliberate. Every shift of her body carried weight and purpose. There was wisdom in every moment, the kind that only comes with time. She has lived a long life for a wild orangutan. She has raised young, navigated a changing forest, and endured everything this place has asked of her.
And there she was again, the first orangutan I saw, just as she had been thirteen years ago. But everything was different.
Standing there, watching her, I felt something I don’t experience often in the wild. Connection. History. A thread that tied who I was then to who I am now.
So much of what I’ve built since that first trip traces back to moments like that one. To her. Pesek isn’t just an orangutan I’ve photographed. She’s part of my story. A constant in a life that has taken me all over the world in search of wild places and wild animals. Bears in Alaska, pumas in Patagonia, gorillas in Africa. And yet, no matter how far I’ve gone, I keep finding my way back here. Back to this forest. Back to her.
Credit: Zac Mills, the Wildlife Collective
There’s something incredibly humbling about returning to the same forest and finding the same individual, still there, still living her life on her terms. It reminds you that this isn’t about us. We are visitors in their world. Passing through. Observing, if we’re lucky. They are the ones who remain.
And then, just days after I left, I heard the news. Pesek gave birth.
A new life, beginning in the same forest where I first met her thirteen years ago. Another chapter in her story. Another thread in a place that has given me so much. It’s hard to put into words what that means to me.
But I know this: If you ever have the chance to see orangutans in the wild, take it. Because it will change you.
It changed me.
And thirteen years later, I’m still feeling the impact of that very first encounter.
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