Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

chimp enrichment

Paper bag day

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First off—today is the Doggie and Troll Olympics! The games are currently underway and although I wish I could be there to enjoy all the fun, Katelyn, myself, and volunteers Connie and Annie are here with the chimps having fun of our own. (If you weren’t able to join the games today, consider making a donation in Foxie’s honor—the troll games, after all, are about Foxie’s love of troll dolls and an early celebration of her August 8th birthday!)

We’re always trying to come up with interesting enrichment themes for the chimps. The other day I noticed how many paper shopping bags we had collected and thought it would be fun to fill them with enrichment and seal them closed so the chimps would have to open them like presents.

Jamie, of course, loved that project—but to my surprise, Burrito found paper bag day to be a big hit! He used them to display with, which is very helpful if you’re a male chimpanzee. And then he methodically went through one bag, but by the time I grabbed the camera, he had emptied it and was using it as a pillow. Who knew paper shopping bags could have so many uses!

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Jamie playing

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We’ve often described Jamie as a complicated chimpanzee. She seems to identify more with the humans than with being a chimpanzee, but at the same time, she’s very socially manipulative and runs the show around here. As the boss, there’s no doubt she always has a lot on her mind. Most of the time, Jamie is pretty serious about things, even when she’s playing with the humans. She will ask to groom our shoes or wrists, play chase, or walk around the hill—and we will usually get a head nod from her as acknowledgement that she’s happy about that moment, but rarely does she laugh when playing with humans. Foxie, however, seems to be the one individual who can really get Jamie to be silly. The other chimpanzees are occasionally able to get Jamie’s silly side out, but not as much as Foxie.

The other day I posted the first part of this video on our Instagram account—if you’re not following us there, you should be! Today I got Foxie and Jamie playing again and laughing pretty hard. It wasn’t long before Jamie caught me, the paparazzi, and shifted her attention away. She looked toward my boot so I played a little tickle game. You’ll be able to see her briefly head nod, but not laugh the way she does when she’s wrestling with Foxie.

I’ve always found it interesting that though Jamie is very human-oriented, she seems to really only let her guard down when playing with other chimpanzees. Jamie is certainly an interesting and complicated chimpanzee, but we love her all the more for it.

Jody the Harvester

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One of the chimpanzees’ favorite activities this time of year is going out on Young’s Hill and harvesting an armful (or mouthful) of the wild plants that grow out there, and bringing them back into the greenhouse to eat or wadge. Jody, especially, is a plant harvesting fiend.

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Streamer day

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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:

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and even Foxie (who doesn’t usually build nests) started to make a streamer nest, too!

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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:

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Jody also un-characteristically swung on a firehose up to one of the windows in the greenhouse (she’s not usually that agile).

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This isn’t a great photo of Annie, but really shows how awesome our streamer maze was:

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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.

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Gifts From Friends

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We’ve written on the blog before about supporters Diane and Syd Marcus’s amazingly creative and thoughtful care packages for the chimpanzees. They always choose personalized gifts for each of the chimps, tailored to their individual interests. In one of these packages last year, Diane and Syd included a French Dora the Explorer doll for Foxie, which became possibly Foxie’s favorite Dora of all time. French Dora was eventually loved to death, but today we received another package from Diane and Syd with another French Dora! Foxie was beside herself. I was unable to get any photos of Foxie with her new Dora for the first hour that she had her, because she took her to a private spot for some snuggling.

For lunch today, we set up a forage on Young’s Hill, and Dora accompanied Foxie on her travels. (She had already lost her pants by this time, but no one seemed to mind.)

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When Foxie’s mouth was too full of food, she tossed Dora on her back for safe keeping.

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Thanks to Diane and Syd for always enriching the chimps’ lives in unique and special ways.

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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