Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
“Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously good looking?” — Derek Zoolander
Here’s a serious portrait of Honey B sitting in one of the front rooms. I hope it brightens all of your respective Mondays!
We humans talk about weather a lot, often marveling at even the predictable and banal. Like me today remarking at the wind gusts, “that’s some wind out there!”
The weather ties everyone to nature, even those who live in jungles made of concrete. It reminds us that we are not, in fact, in control of everything.
After a long and dry summer here at the sanctuary, the fall rains and cloud-filled days felt abrupt and at times a little oppressive. But the plants almost immediately showed their gratitude, making parts of the landscape look like a second spring. The grass sprung from the ground and the grazing animals filled their bellies with this earthly gift.
Today, the skies were clear and the sun bathed the landscape, quickly urging yesterday’s snow to feed the plants some more.
Even the chimps seemed to be operating under the rules of spring, with Jamie insisting I go on two walks with her in a row. One where five other chimpanzees joined, and one that was just the two of us.
On this second walk, with the warm rays of the sun tempering the wind, Jamie was in no hurry. She stopped to inspect a new log placed to brace one of the structures, and then sat on an outpost of that structure, gazing over her kingdom.
As I waited for her signal to continue, I marveled at the signs of plant life emerging amid summer’s leftover debris.
Jamie had me bring one of her new favorite boots on the walk with her. Luckily, she allowed me to wear my own boots and, instead, carry her star-spangled treasure.
As we continued on our walk, I kept looking at the ground and was surprised to see a brazen dandelion in bloom, another reminder of all the plant life under the surface, at the ready for the right conditions to show itself.
When I returned to the chimp house, I looked at the raspberry bushes and noticed new growth, taking one last giant photosynthetic gulp of the season.
Going around to see the six chimpanzees who arrived just shy of five months ago, I found them too soaking in the sun in the shelter of their newly paneled greenhouse.
It’s a little funny that we refer to these areas as greenhouses, a term usually reserved for shelters that allow plants to thrive even when the outside conditions wouldn’t allow the same, and not generally used to refer to shelters for nature’s more mobile kingdom. Today, however, the term seemed more than apt.
While not photosynthesizing, the chimpanzees were certainly soaking in the sun and perhaps storing some energy for future use.
As an atmospheric river flows over the Pacific Northwest and hammers the Cascades with wind, rain and snow, our sheltered valley has experienced an odd mix of beautiful and horrible weather this week. That hasn’t stopped one group of chimps from making use of their expansive outdoor habitat: Young’s Hill.
“The Hill” was completed in 2011 and serves as the primary outdoor enclosure for the original group of seven chimps. Over the years, J.B. et al. have furnished the habitat with groves of bamboo, a network of firehose vines, elevated wooden platforms, hanging tire swings and hammocks, and even an artificial termite mound. Since the enclosure contains an open pasture without any large trees, the crew has also added numerous pine logs for the chimps to climb on. While we monitor the larger structures for safety and stability, there’s not much we can do about the untreated timber decomposing at a natural rate. These need to be replaced every few years.
When we let the chimps have access to Young’s Hill yesterday morning, we were already aware that one of the logs (which had been sunk vertically into the ground) had blown over and was leaning on some firehose vines. Assessing the situation from afar, we agreed it still looked safe enough for the chimps to go on their morning patrol while we coordinated with J.B. to get it repaired.
After caregiver Chad did his routine race around the boundary with Burrito, Jamie demanded that someone accompany her on another patrol of the perimeter fence. I put the telephoto zoom lens on the camera and trudged up the hill while wearing her preferred Xtratuf boots. Burrito soon joined us, sprinting and laughing, and effectively replaced me as Jamie’s walking buddy.
I was resigned to finishing the patrol as the “third wheel” when I noticed Missy sitting on the aforementioned wonky post. Missy is an intrepid adventurer when outdoors, and she didn’t seem to care that the log was tilted askew and wobbled quite a bit. In fact, she seemed to even find the new perch to be comfortable.
As I continued to trek around the perimeter of the enclosure, I saw Missy again from a different perspective. This time, I could see that she also had “brought” a buddy with her: Annie. The two were sitting like gargoyles on adjacent structures, partially hidden in the maze of pine trunks and bamboo.
I saw the dark silhouette of another chimpanzee in the periphery of my vision, and turned the camera lens towards Foxie as she climbed up onto a closer platform.
Foxie seems to enjoy moments of solitude in the outdoors, but I remembered that she probably considers her dolls to be her adventure companions. Perhaps she doesn’t think of herself as being alone even though no other chimps are close by. Either way, it wasn’t long before Foxie also had a chimpanzee buddy: Jody. Together, they surveyed the valley and seemed most intrigued by a distant plume of smoke swirling upward from a prescribed burn.
Foxie and Jody resumed their journey as a duo, making their way through the tall grass to one of their favorite installations: the Lookout Tower. Foxie preferred to sit on the highest deck with her doll while Jody ventured out on the Shaky Bridge towards Carlene’s Tower.
After the chimps went back inside, Chad closed off the Hill and we did safety checks to unlock the enclosure for maintenance. J.B. was ready to go with a buddy of his own: a brand new Kubota L4060 tractor.
There are certain pieces of equipment that the sanctuary cannot do without, and a functioning tractor is one. J.B. has been planning to upgrade the sanctuary’s tractor for years and excitedly worked out the financing. With all of the maintenance and renovations to be done in the upcoming months, the time was right to welcome a new Kubota to the family.
To quote J.B. directly, “You can tell everyone that, second to my wedding day, the day the tractor arrived was the happiest day of my life.”
Importantly, the new tractor has a closed cab which will save us from freezing our eyeballs off while driving it in the winter. I’m excited that it came with cup holders so I can sip on cold brew while I plow the driveway in the winter, and J.B. personally added a Bluetooth music player so he can blast Van Halen (probably) while he moves things around with the forks.
Someday in the near future, even Young’s Hill will get a “buddy.” In addition to expanding the Young’s Hill perimeter to include more adjacent pasture and parts of the nearby woodland, we plan to build a second outdoor enclosure called The Bray. The new tractor will be invaluable as we tear down and build entire sections of electrified fence, plant more trees and bamboo, and furnish the two areas with new enrichment structures. (You can all read about our past, present and future plans for the facility in this blog post: The King of the Courtyard and His Growing Kingdom.)
Hopefully, the new layout will make things even better for the chimpanzees who call this place “home.”
Today was a somewhat busy day. While we humans were making progress cleaning enclosures in the morning, we were thwarted by two holdouts by the time the afternoon rolled around. Now I won’t mention names, but…
*ahem*
*ahem*
While it’s pretty easy to work around when certain somebodies holdout, it just adds a little more time to the day. We don’t necessarily get upset about their choice to remain in certain areas we want to clean when we want to clean them because it is just that. Their choice.
During some periodic breaks during cleaning as we tried to develop our next plan of action on the fly, I was able to get these photos.
Hopefully these photos will bring some joy to you on your Monday.
Recently, I came across an old video that I narrated that mentioned how rare it was to hear Burrito laughing, and I was surprised.
Wait… Burrito didn’t laugh?!
I searched the blog and found more references to this phenomenon, like this one from as late as 2010, two years after he arrived at the sanctuary with his six groupmates.
Burrito’s laughter reverberates his side of the building frequently now. It’s really hard to believe that wasn’t always the case.
I even quizzed J.B. and he didn’t remember a time when Burrito didn’t laugh.
I talked to former staff member and current volunteer Elizabeth, who took the above video today during a volunteer shift, and she also couldn’t remember a silently-playful Burrito. We did both vaguely remember speculating that Burrito would put his hand or objects in his mouth to muffle the sound of his laughter.
We’re glad Burrito found his (laughing) voice.
Here’s a bonus photo from today of Gordo, Rayne, and Dora. It made me laugh.
All sixteen of the chimpanzees now at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest began their lives or spent decades in biomedical research.
If you are subscribed to our e-newsletter, you should have received an email yesterday (https://chimpsnw.salsalabs.org/novemberupdates) with some sad news for chimpanzees who are just as deserving of a sanctuary life away from laboratories.
While there was promising progress for a number of years getting chimpanzees out of research laboratories and into sanctuaries, there have been some very disturbing decisions by the NIH in the last few years that have left over 90 chimpanzees still in labs.
As the newsletter suggested, one action you can take right now is to reach out to your representatives. Animal Protection of New Mexico makes this easy. Senator Kennedy in Louisiana is speaking out publicly about these decisions and more members of congress should join him.
We’ll be sharing more information about this in the coming weeks.
Today has been another busy day at the sanctuary, so I’m going to forego my usual style in favor of something simple and brief.
I took some photographs with my phone today in order to show you all what it takes to keep everything clean, organized, and functioning around here. Our care staff has to complete many tasks each day, in addition to special projects and weekly chores, and these images show some of those.
One ongoing project has been the weatherization of the new greenhouses. J.B. has been working around the clock (with some help from special project volunteer Adam) to get the panels secured to the outside of these massive outdoor enclosures. The results are already remarkable! The panels will keep the area warm by radiating sunlight inward and shielding the chimps from the winds of winter, so we’re getting them done just in time.
Meanwhile, inside the building, the rest of the team was busy preparing meals, enrichment and meds; shifting and performing safety checks; cleaning all the enclosures; washing heaps of dirty blankets, dishes and chimp toys; and processing a produce delivery that arrived this morning.
It may look like a chaotic mess throughout the day, but things are looking ship-shape right now as I’m closing up the building for the evening.
We occasionally remind people that caregiving for chimps isn’t all fun and games, but sometimes it takes a chimp-less blog post to sell that concept.
Have a great week, everyone!
How lucky are we all that we have Lucky Chimpanzee in our lives now?! As Katelyn described, she is a gentle soul with an ineffable charm.
Her lunch forage, as seen in the video above, also included cherry tomatoes, of course, as we have noticed that is one of her favorite foods. We didn’t get a lot of video or photos of Lucky because she, Rayne and Dora enjoyed the party upstairs while “the boys” partied on the first floor
I love these photos that Kelsi took after the party because they are so sweet and because I know she had to go to some lengths to take the photos through the upstairs window to that playroom.
Lucky is the chimp puddle in the front of the photo below, with Terry far left, Dora far right, Cy behind Lucky, and Rayne’s foot in the right corner:
Lucky and Rayne:
Rayne sleeping off that oatmeal:
Thanks goes to Chad for the party plans, Dr. Erin for the oatmeal idea, Kelsi, Anna, J.B. and Lizz for pulling off simultaneous parties in different parts of the sanctuary, and also to Paulette once again for sponsoring Lucky’s special day.
