Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Diana

The Healing Touch

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Even though the chimpanzees always live together as one group, Negra chooses to spend a lot of her time alone – often curled up in a big comfortable nest with a blanket over her head. She has a favorite spot on the catwalk of the playroom by the windows where she can lay in her nest and still keep an eye on things but remain out of the fray.

When she’s not in her nest, we frequently find her near her mound of blankets, looking out of the window. I see Negra gazing out of the windows in a way that I rarely witness the other chimpanzees doing.

She can spend long periods of time taking in the view that includes the cattle and horses on the neighboring property, the old highway, and the railroad. Negra exudes serenity in these quiet, private moments.

 

Even us introverts benefit from the company of others, though. Sometimes it helps to have a friend insist that you spend time with them. Missy in particular makes sure that Negra remains part of the social fabric. Missy is the self-appointed doctor of the group, examining every body part and tending to wounds. You might say that Missy has a healing touch.

 

After years of forced-isolation, the opportunity for Negra to develop long-lasting and trusting relationships with the other chimpanzees is one of the greatest gifts that this sanctuary has given.

 

False Spring at the Sanctuary

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I have to keep reminding myself that we’re just in the second week of February. It feels like the end of March outside today, and we haven’t even had much of a winter, making the warm temperature, singing birds, sun, and bare grass even more confusing.

Missy, for one, is embracing it all.

She shot out onto the hill this morning and I’ve hardly seen her indoors all day.

 

This sanctuary was made for her…

 

 

Thank you to everyone who makes Missy’s sanctuary life possible!

You never know what the day will bring

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Wednesday was an eventful day. The drain for the front rooms was clogged, so J.B. rented a plumbing snake to try to clear it. Jamie is always interested when there’s equipment around, so she was watching J.B. as he worked on the drain. Maybe she felt a little left out, or maybe she had been thinking about this for a while, but, for whatever reason, she decided to do some surface destruction to part of the wall in the playroom.

And there went J.B.’s plan for the day.

Volunteer Kailie was serving lunch in the front rooms when Jamie was doing her redecorating. With the added incentive of a few grapes, I was able to convince Jamie to come into the front rooms along with everyone else so that I could close off the playroom for J.B. to patch the wall. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to patch things up, but it was likely going to be a few hours.

They still had plenty of places to be – the front rooms, the greenhouse, and Young’s Hill (it was a mild, sunny day). But there had been some tension in the group lately, so I immediately started thinking about activities that might keep them busy and maybe out of each other’s way. I had a couple of things in mind and decided to see what they were up to so I could assess the situation.

Lo and behold, I found all seven chimpanzees occupying just a few square feet on the top of the structure of the green house! Negra was in her spot on the corner napping (she’s the only one you can’t see in the photo below), and the rest were huddled up in pairs grooming.

 

Perhaps Jamie had some sort of master plan to cause an incident so everyone would bond and work out the tensions they were having with one another. Probably not, but isn’t that a nice interpretation?

The chimps were not bothered at all by being locked out of the playroom. At one point, Annie and Negra were in the front rooms playing. Luckily, I was able to grab a camera and get some of their play session, which is one of the funniest things I’ve filmed in a long time. Be prepared to laugh out loud.

 

 

J.B. got the wall patched up in a few short hours and the playroom was ready for the chimpanzees to go back into after their dinner. They weren’t the least bit anxious to get back to that space – even Jamie, who I would have thought would want to inspect J.B.’s handiwork asap.

It just goes to show that the chimpanzees are not predictable, and sometimes an unexpected change to the routine can result in wanting to playfully push all of the air out of your friend (see video above).

 

Burrito Chimpanzee in Black and White

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Continuing with the black and white/grey theme from Saturday, and thanks to comments on that blog post, I decided to truly embrace this way of seeing and capturing images by setting the camera to monochrome and finding out what might happen.

I had to climb a ladder in the greenhouse to get these photos, but Burrito willingly served as the most handsome subject anyone could hope to have.

I might just be in love with black and white.

 

Burrito wears it well.

 

The Beauty of Grey

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As you probably know, we have an enrichment calendar that guides the volunteer or staff member who is putting together enrichment for the following day for the chimpanzees. It provides some sort of theme for the day, like “art day” or “troll scarves.” Sometimes it’s just a color, which causes us to dig through the enrichment bins and perhaps unearth that blue or red or green toy that hasn’t surfaced in a while.

I was laughing yesterday about the theme for today’s enrichment: Grey Day.

It is entirely appropriate, being that the outside world is on the grey spectrum today. Right before I opened the door to the hill to let the chimpanzees decide whether or not to venture out into the overcast day or stay inside, a bald eagle flew overhead. I was marveling at how majestic he was, gliding through the sky, unmistakable from other birds with his starkly contrasting white head with black wings.

This led me to wonder if perhaps I was thinking about Grey Day in an entirely unfair light (so to speak). Grey is beautiful. To prove it, just look at these black and white photos of the chimpanzees. Removing the distraction of color can be a special thing. With the photos of the chimps, I just want to study them a little bit longer, and I notice features that maybe I would overlook in the same photo saturated with color.

So, today, we embrace the grey.

 

Jamie:

 

Jody:

 

Missy:

A whirlwind of years

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Today is about time flying by and some of the great random moments in the lives of the chimpanzees over the last ten years.

I’ve started and stopped this blog so many times today that I lost count.

 

There were toys to clean:

 

Laundry to do:

 

Amazing interns to train:

 

Paper braids for evening enrichment to be made (most of which were made by the aforementioned amazing interns):

 

 

And of course walks to take. Jamie was in the running mood today, so this quick snapshot was the only halfway decent photo I was able to get on one of our day walks:

 

Plus a whole host of other daily activities.

 

And then more walks after dinner! (well after I thought I would have this blog posted).

Courtesy of the unseasonably mild weather and the lengthening days, Jamie did three more walks after her evening meal, with Missy joining her for two of them.

 

This year’s HOOT! gala on May 19th will celebrate ten years of the Cle Elum Seven chimpanzees living the sanctuary life. TEN YEARS!

We are in the process of a website redesign right now. I’m really excited about a whole new look that highlights the great photos of the chimpanzees and hopefully makes it easy for people to be drawn in and fall in love with them. Here’s a sneak peek:

When the designers were starting to move the data over from the existing site into the new design, they ran into a snag because of the amount of content that we had in the blog. Ten years worth of photos, videos, and stories, it seems, takes up quite a bit of space.

I love that we have this diary of the chimpanzees’ days and the moments that were funny, poignant, and sometimes even mundane.

I remember being a kid and thinking that a week, or even a day (an hour?), was an excruciatingly long time to wait for something. I remember adults saying, “don’t complain – when you get older, time will fly by.”

Never were truer words uttered.

Lately, I feel like I’m in a movie montage – days pass by in seconds, and years are contained in just a minute’s worth of highlights. But then there’s this blog with all of these posts that mark real moments in time over the last several years. Moments that the chimpanzees were living to the fullest. Days that were spent with companionship, favorite foods, boots, trolls, blankets. Years that marked new additions to their home. Almost a decade of exploration into this new life they were given.

 

Here’s a look back on the last ten years of blog posts for January 20th (or thereabouts – we didn’t always post to the blog every single day – can you imagine!)

 

January 21, 2008:

not-so-shy Foxie

 

January 19, 2009:

Trolls: Not just for Foxie!

 

January 19, 2010:

Annie Upside Down

 

 

January 20, 2011:

Greenhouse play

 

January 21, 2012:

the snow days continue

 

January 20, 2013:

Floppy ears

 

January 20, 2014:

There’s something about Burrito

 

January 21, 2015:

Always a reason to play

 

January 20, 2016:

20 snapshots of the day

 

January 20, 2017:

Tool Use

 

And that bring us to today. Happy January 20th to everyone. Thank you for following along!

 

Trying new things

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The other day, after the PRT session that Elizabeth filmed, Jamie and I followed a typical post-PRT routine. Because I had spent the last fifteen minutes requesting that she do things, it was her turn to request that I do something (I’m pretty sure that Jamie believes it is ALWAYS time for the humans to do something for her, but I digress). So I put on her latest favorite pair of boots, we did a perimeter walk, and afterward we settled in for a grooming session in the greenhouse.

Jamie is easily the most dexterous chimpanzee I’ve ever known, and she’s a master at using tools. Her fine-motor ability is really quite impressive. Just watch this video of Jamie giving J.B. a “manicure” and read this story about her tool-altering skills and forethought.

It was just Jamie in the greenhouse, grooming my fingers and the boots, when Annie came over with a tool of her own.

 

For the first several years of Annie’s sanctuary life, she didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the humans – not because she wasn’t interested in us, but, I think, because she was a ball of anxiety, and she didn’t want to over-step her place in the social world of chimpanzees and humans. We have written many times on the blog about Annie’s ever-growing confidence in the last few years (for example, this touching post from Elizabeth).

 

We’ve witnessed all of the chimpanzees trying new things over the last nine+ years at the sanctuary. We’ve gotten to know them so well that when they do something new, it stands out. You may already be familiar with “Fake Neggie” – a nickname for Missy when she is adopting Negra’s quintessential blanket-over-head nesting style.

 

You may not know that there was a time a few years ago when Negra decided troll dolls were her thing too, carrying one with her from bed to meals to adventures on Young’s Hill.

It lasted for a few weeks, then the fad seemed to pass for Negra and she’s been mostly troll-less ever since, leaving the doll obsession to Foxie.

 

Jody is sometimes seen with troll dolls, and Annie tries them out once in a while too.

 

Imitation is an important part of observing and learning. J.B. wrote a blog post back in 2012 about how copying the behavior of others shouldn’t be dismissed as somehow intellectually unimpressive. It’s worth the read.

 

When Annie confidently walked towards me with her rather blunt tool and pushed it out through the caging to groom the boot I was wearing, my smile could not have been any bigger. She was clumsy and awkward with the over-sized tool she had chosen, but she gave it a go, even with boss Jamie sitting right there to watch.

 

Annie didn’t stay long, and I don’t think she had any kind of magical insight about why Jamie spends so much time engaging in this behavior.

 

To have an interesting and full life and to get a better idea of who you are, you have to try new things – even things you aren’t sure you will be good at doing. Annie seems to know this now. She’s 100% signed up for this sanctuary life, and I have no doubt she and her chimpanzee companions will continue to try new things, figuring out more about themselves and delighting and surprising us along the way.