chimp

Time to Eat

May 17, 2014 by Diana

We’ve mentioned foraging many times on this blog before. It’s such a fundamental part of being a chimpanzee, that we had one of the seven behavioral booths at our recent Hoot! gala dedicated to this activity and explaining how we find ways to allow the chimpanzees here to express this behavior. Anything involving food is exciting for chimpanzees, but finding it on your own is particularly exciting.

Yesterday, Jody won the award for stuffing the most foraged food in her mouth at one time:

Though Missy certainly gets an honorable mention:

Play initiation and Hoot!

May 3, 2014 by Debbie

Tonight is our very first Hoot! gala event and I’m so excited to see everyone. I hope you all are ready to Give a Hoot! tonight! And don’t worry, for those of you that aren’t able to make it to the gala, we are going to have an online auction later this summer so everyone can participate.

Yesterday I posted about Jamie’s huge paper nest, but I left out a couple photos that Elizabeth took that day. She captured Annie initiating some play by biting on the handrail of the stairs in the playroom, right above where Jamie was nesting. Missy couldn’t resist her invitation and of course started play slapping and wrestling immediately. They didn’t seem to mind that Jamie was trying to perfect her nest just inches away—and luckily, Jamie didn’t seem to be disturbed, either.

Lots and lots of paper

May 2, 2014 by Debbie

We’ve posted about the enrichment theme “lots of paper” before, but it never gets old with the chimps. They love it, so we try to work that theme into each month—so long as we have extra paper to spare. Yesterday we had plenty, including a bunch of paper from some boxes that were shipped from Amazon when people sent us supplies we needed from our wishlist. You probably didn’t know you were helping us stock the shelves AND enriching the chimps at the same time did you? 🙂

Jamie definitely appreciated the extra paper, and we threw in some crepe paper, toilet paper, and a big roll of red paper for additional nesting materials. She built the biggest paper nest I’ve seen! It was an all day project that she returned to a few times to perfect her comfy spot.

First, she started with the brown paper from the Amazon boxes and added the giant roll of red paper.

She abandoned it at one point (probably to go on a perimeter walk of Young’s Hill) and you can see just how elaborate it is:

Later she returned and added some toilet paper, which she reportedly had wrapped around her like a mummy but when the paparazzi (Elizabeth) arrived she quickly brushed it off herself. The toilet paper added a nice softness to the nest and she curled up with some boots to take a mid-day nap.

Photographing the elusive Foxie

April 19, 2014 by Diana

One super cool and unique auction item we have for Hoot! is the opportunity to photograph the chimpanzees with a lesson from professional photographers Karen Ducey and Dean Rutz, using long telephoto lenses and other professional-grade equipment! This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities!

Maybe the winner will be able to catch some photos like these of the first elusive, then charming Foxie with her troll dolls on Young’s Hill:

Whole apple forage

April 18, 2014 by Debbie

Jamie really cleaned up in today’s breakfast forage. We put out whole apples and she was absolutely beside herself—carrying them around in hand and in foot. Thankfully the other chimps were able to get some as well—I posted photos of Annie, Burrito, and Missy on their Facebook pages. I saw Foxie and Jody with some too but couldn’t get a good photo. And Negra? Well, she was preoccupied with the peanuts that were scattered around. Not surprising at all 🙂

Relaxing

April 4, 2014 by Debbie

I found some photos on the computer taken by Elizabeth and Lisa a few days ago. Just looking at these pictures makes me feel so relaxed!

April Fool’s Day at the chimp house

April 1, 2014 by Debbie

We are always trying to come up with fun and interesting ideas to enrich the chimpanzees at CSNW. Since today is April Fool’s Day, I was coming up with ways to mix things up for the chimps. We tried to serve lunch at breakfast, which didn’t seem to go over as well as I had thought—the chimps were expecting fruit smoothie! So we made up for that faux pas by doing a smoothie forage.

While Elizabeth and I were setting up the smoothie cups, we were trying to come up with “jokes” to play with the enrichment. We decided to put all their toys for the day inside an old trash can, and “leave behind” some things we normally don’t let the chimps have. We left a disinfectant container (with tea instead of disinfectant of course) and a gum container with just a couple pieces of gum in it, plus some kitchen utensils and other chimp-safe things we could find. This part of the day’s enrichment went much better than the first April Fool’s joke we played on the chimps! They loved it.

Jamie was the first to open the trash can of enrichment, and Annie was very interested, too.