Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Anna

Happy 45th birthday Negra!

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Happiest of honorary birthdays to Negra Chimpanzee! We are throwing a big party this weekend for Negra’s birthday and the 10th year of the chimpanzees arriving at the sanctuary, so stay tuned for that! Today we are doing some special things just for Queen Negra, namely giving her some of her favorite things to eat. This morning we started the day with sweet potato pancakes! Negra loves both sweet potatoes AND bread, so these pancakes were just the right thing for a breakfast treat. In case you missed the video of the chimps eating their pancakes, you should definitely check out our Facebook Live video on our page. For lunch we put out a lettuce and peanut forage on Young’s Hill, two more of Negra’s favorites.
In preparation for dinner, volunteer caregiver Jake is busy baking sweet potatoes, peeling corn and cutting up oranges. The queen will be thrilled!

The birthday girl enjoying her lunch forage:

A new evening food puzzle

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Jamie is the food puzzle star of the sanctuary, and she is also the most dominant of the group, so you might notice a lot of blog posts about her working on different puzzles that we give the chimps as evening enrichment. She has a tendency to want to keep all the puzzles to herself, so we’ve been working on finding new puzzles that we can fix to different spots around the chimps’ enclosure to give some of the other chimps more opportunities to access the puzzles.

Recently, I’ve gotten several videos of some of the other (non-Jamie) chimpanzees working on food puzzles. This video was taken while Jamie is otherwise occupied with her own project to work on inside the building. Here’s Jody trying out a new shake bottle puzzle. She makes it look pretty easy, so next time I think we will need to add some shredded paper for an added challenge!

Those hardworking humans

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The chimpanzees are so lucky to have such amazing volunteers and interns working for them. The sanctuary is fortunate to have a core group of volunteers from the surrounding community, as well as a fleet of Primate Behavior student interns because of our collaborative learning agreement with Central Washington University.

Our volunteers and interns help take care of all those important daily tasks that are critical to giving the chimps comfortable and happy lives.

From preparing meals:

And in turn, serving those meals to the chimps:

To cleaning enclosures:

Keeping Burrito entertained is a pretty important job in itself:

And the boss Jamie has her own list of requirements for volunteers.
Like being a patient grooming partner:

And a diligent friend to walk with:

And being willing to repeat the process for an undetermined amount of time:

Some industrious volunteers come to the sanctuary just to help with building projects, like the newest structure that was put up earlier this spring:

Other volunteers help support our outreach and fundraising projects. Our spring fundraising gala Hoot, required dozens of volunteers to put together and pull off the big night!

Handing out sanctuary information and selling merchandise helps the chimps gain fans and supporters at our tabling events (hope to see you at the first Roslyn Farmers Market of the year this Sunday!)

Last year’s Seattle Vegfest 🙂

The end of spring means it’s time to say see you later to some of our college interns until fall as they take their summer break or leave for far off places for their thesis data collection. Others are finishing up their time at CWU and moving on to the next big adventure!

Here are just a few of this year’s masters students that will be graduating this weekend:

Next week we are excited to welcome our summer interns to the sanctuary! Thanks to all those that care about the Cle Elum 7!

Comforting Negra

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Looking back at our past snake videos, there is a reason you don’t see Negra involved in any of the action of eradication. She wants nothing to do with it. This morning I think she spotted something in the grass on Young’s Hill that resembled a snake, because she started alarm calling and retreating back towards the greenhouse. Negra is pretty socially savvy, and she knows just who to seek help and reassurance from.

She first headed towards Jody to let her know she was distressed. Here she is fear grimacing (not a happy smile for chimpanzees).

She found shelter on a log where she could keep off the ground and continued to whimper and alarm call.

Luckily she has a friend like Jody to do some snake investigation for her.

And she has Foxie on hand for emotional support:

Excitement over, it was back to the greenhouse where she could watch the activity from the safety of her nest.

Particular palates

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The chimpanzees each have their own unique food preferences. We’ve talked a lot about how Jody will eat a huge assortment of vegetation she finds on Young’s Hill. Foxie on the other hand, has more of a sweet tooth, so she will opt out of many types of greens, in favor of things like sweet potatoes and fruit. A lot of the chimps will eat produce that we humans would think of being really intensely flavorful, in much greater quantities than most humans would ever dream of eating.

I personally could not imagine eating a whole raw onion, but the chimps eat them without thinking twice.
Missy:

And pine tree is not on most humans’ dinner menus.
Jody:

We’ve tasted the wild prickly lettuce that Negra loves so much, and it is tongue twistingly bitter.

The one funny thing we have noticed is that the chimps don’t seem to like a lot of spices in their meals. We don’t cook things for them all that often (instead they usually eat a lot of raw produce), but when we do get a little adventurous with a cooked meal, the chimps are often skeptical, picking through their meals for anything suspect. They have no use for things like basil, oregano and cinnamon, so we generally leave things pretty simple.

Burrito eating all the parts of a lime this morning: