Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Archives for May 2014

Play initiation and Hoot!

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Tonight is our very first Hoot! gala event and I’m so excited to see everyone. I hope you all are ready to Give a Hoot! tonight! And don’t worry, for those of you that aren’t able to make it to the gala, we are going to have an online auction later this summer so everyone can participate.

Yesterday I posted about Jamie’s huge paper nest, but I left out a couple photos that Elizabeth took that day. She captured Annie initiating some play by biting on the handrail of the stairs in the playroom, right above where Jamie was nesting. Missy couldn’t resist her invitation and of course started play slapping and wrestling immediately. They didn’t seem to mind that Jamie was trying to perfect her nest just inches away—and luckily, Jamie didn’t seem to be disturbed, either.

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Lots and lots of paper

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We’ve posted about the enrichment theme “lots of paper” before, but it never gets old with the chimps. They love it, so we try to work that theme into each month—so long as we have extra paper to spare. Yesterday we had plenty, including a bunch of paper from some boxes that were shipped from Amazon when people sent us supplies we needed from our wishlist. You probably didn’t know you were helping us stock the shelves AND enriching the chimps at the same time did you? 🙂

Jamie definitely appreciated the extra paper, and we threw in some crepe paper, toilet paper, and a big roll of red paper for additional nesting materials. She built the biggest paper nest I’ve seen! It was an all day project that she returned to a few times to perfect her comfy spot.

First, she started with the brown paper from the Amazon boxes and added the giant roll of red paper.

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She abandoned it at one point (probably to go on a perimeter walk of Young’s Hill) and you can see just how elaborate it is:

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Later she returned and added some toilet paper, which she reportedly had wrapped around her like a mummy but when the paparazzi (Elizabeth) arrived she quickly brushed it off herself. The toilet paper added a nice softness to the nest and she curled up with some boots to take a mid-day nap.

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