Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Debbie

Happy Birthday, Alisa!

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Today was sponsored by Ed for Alisa Brooks, and it’s her 50th birthday! Ed shared this wonderful message with us:

Alisa is turning 50 today and she would rather help the chimps get some yummy food than get a present herself. Alisa has a depth of love for animals that is always guiding her. I can see the warmth of her heart, as she watches the chimps in their many adventures at the sanctuary. Whether she is tracking the travels of whales, helping a lost pet reunite with its human, or watching the chimps play, she is doing what she loves.

Thank you Alisa for caring so much about the Cle Elum Seven, and thank you to Ed for generously sponsoring the day for her! Here’s a photo of Annie and Missy playing:

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Games with Foxie

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Okay, okay — I know I just posted a bunch of Foxie photos yesterday, but this video was just too much fun to not post. So, here she is, the nearly 38 year old chimp who is going on six. 🙂

Foxie with a new troll and outreach updates

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If you are active on our Facebook pages and like to see updates about the chimps there—I have some important news! We have decided to share more photos of the chimps on our main page and close down the individual chimp pages, so it’s all in one place and more people will get to see stories about the Cle Elum Seven. We have made dedicated photo albums of each chimp and will be transferring photos from their individual pages to these albums this week.

We’re also going to participate in the social media challenge of 100 Happy Days. The idea is that for 100 days in a row, we will post a picture of something that represents happiness for the sanctuary. Really, every day is a happy day in sanctuary, so this shouldn’t be too hard! We will use the hashtag #100HappyDays so that any other person participating in the challenge will see our posts, too. I think it will be a lot of fun and I hope you all will enjoy it. We will do the majority of the posts on our Instagram and Pinterest pages, but will post them to our Facebook page as well once a week. Even if you don’t use those social media sites, you can still view the photos!

As a side, we are SO close to reaching 10,000 likes. How awesome would it be to reach that goal? Anytime you like, comment, or share a post from our page you help to get more friends for the sanctuary, and we can always use more friends! I’m making it a personal goal to reach 10,000 likes by the end of the 100 Happy Days. Even if it means I have to hunt down another 300 friends just to make it! But something tells me that with all our wonderful and caring supporters, it won’t be too hard to get you all to share some of our posts and encourage yours friends to like the page.

Anyway, on to the most important part of this post—Foxie with a new troll! 🙂

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Friendships

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It’s Friend Friday! Okay, well, we may have made that up last week—but it turns out that it actually is a thing! So, we thought we’d keep the trend going and post about some friendships today.

This morning I got a video of rambunctious play between Foxie, Diana, and Burrito. At one point, Burrito turned toward Foxie and they started to play with each other. This is really important for their bonding, and we as caregivers tend to take a step back and let them play on their own. You’ll see in the video that Diana did just that. Later on, Jody joined in too, and started to play tug with Foxie. Foxie looked toward Diana to keep playing with her, but Jody was so insistent that Foxie play with her that Diana encouraged Foxie to direct her attention back to Jody.

This is a little bit longer than the videos I usually post, but the whole thing was so great I had a hard time cutting anything out. Enjoy, and please share on social media with the hashtag #FriendFriday!

Photos from today and Negra’s Journey

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Check out this post on One Green Planet we posted today about Negra. It’s truly a wonderful story and we’d love it if you would share it on social media, or just forward the link to your friends!

Here’s some pictures I took today — the weather is absolutely gorgeous so we set up a quick lunch forage for the chimps to enjoy!

Foxie:

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Burrito:

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Jamie checking out some welding work J.B. was doing down at the caregiver house:

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And then she took her pile inside to enjoy and let me snap this nice head shot of her:

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Sidewalks!

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You may have picked up that Katelyn mentioned that J.B. and Ken Mikkelson were prepping the areas around the chimp house for sidewalks on Wednesday, and yesterday the Poppoff crew came out and started work on forming the concrete. Today they finished the sidewalks and now they are curing and drying so we can start using them in a few days. The Poppoffs are long-time supporters of the sanctuary and have helped us with other construction projects including Young’s Hill and even years ago when we created the greenhouse.

So, why sidewalks? It’s all part of the veterinary clinic project that we started last year. The cement pad in front of the gate will make it easier if we need to move big equipment in or out of the chimp house, including the trailer itself. The sidewalks go from the chimp area doors to the clinic, so we can easily transfer a chimp to the clinic if we need to. They also will be much nicer to shovel and put ice melt on in the winter! So, we are pretty excited about these sidewalks.

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The chimps were very interested in all the work going on, and watched from Young’s Hill:

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Happy Birthday, Keith!

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Today is CSNW’s Founder Keith LaChappelle‘s birthday! And guess how he is spending it? Working hard on helping get things ready for installing our sprinkler system! (which you can read more about at the end of this post if you need a reminder). Keith and his friend and long-time supporter of the sanctuary, Nick Dean, are busy prepping PVC piping for the sprinkler system today and digging a trench all along the fence line. Thanks to the ASPCA for a grant allowing us to install a wildfire sprinkler system!

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We can’t thank Keith enough for all he has done for Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest and the Cle Elum Seven, and today is no different. Happy Birthday, Keith!