Yesterday during the streamer maze party, I caught some close-ups of the chimps’ beautiful faces.
Jody:
Missy:
Negra:
French Dora peeking out from behind Foxie’s ear:
Animal Welfare
Streamer day
Every day we like to provide the chimpanzees with different enrichment themes to make their day interesting. We also love to throw parties for any occasion! We even have a storage bin of extra party supplies, which has collected a lot of surplus streamer rolls lately. So today we decided to call “Streamer Day,” and Elizabeth, volunteer Sandra, and I made an intricate maze of streamers in the greenhouse this morning.
You may recall this video of Burrito really enjoying the streamers for our Seahawks party—so we were hoping today’s theme would be a big hit.
I think that our streamer maze was a success overall! Missy built a pretty great nest with some of the streamers:
and even Foxie (who doesn’t usually build nests) started to make a streamer nest, too!
Some of the chimpanzees really like to wadge the streamers. I personally am not an expert on streamer taste, but perhaps each color is different—Jody was interested in tasting each flavor of this Neapolitan-esque streamer:
Jody also un-characteristically swung on a firehose up to one of the windows in the greenhouse (she’s not usually that agile).
This isn’t a great photo of Annie, but really shows how awesome our streamer maze was:
Foxie is still hanging on to French Dora, who now has also lost her shirt in addition to the pants and beret she lost yesterday.
How time flies
I was just telling JB yesterday, I can’t believe it is just two weeks away from our six year anniversary! Wow. How is it almost half-way through 2014 already? Well the saying rings true here at the sanctuary—how time flies when you’re having fun. 🙂
Perhaps it’s on my mind because we’re going to start doing 100 Happy Days next week, but I’ve been thinking about all the really great memories from the last six years! I’m curious what YOUR favorite happy moments are. Comment here with your most favorite memory (and if you have it bookmarked already, give us the link to the blog post about it, so new readers can look back with us!)
Here’s some photos I found from this month that hadn’t been posted before, of the seven amazing chimpanzees we’ve had the pleasure of caring for during the last six years.
I’m looking forward to hearing what your favorite happy moments are!
Happy Birthday, Alisa!
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:
Games with Foxie
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
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! 🙂
Friendships
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!
