Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
This magical day was sponsored by Sylvia Gandolfo in honor of Carrie Miller:
“Happy Autumnal Equinox to Carrie (Miller) and the chimps as the beauty of fall surrounds all of you.”
Many thanks to you, Sylvia and Carrie, for helping us celebrate this most wonderful time of year! Happy autumn hoots from your Pals, Burrito and Annie. 😉
Have a beautiful day!
Silly B:
Annie:
I don’t think a day goes by at the sanctuary right now without significant change of some sort. Learning behaviors and personalities from new chimpanzee friends, seeing new behaviors with long-time chimpanzee friends, new areas for chimpanzees and humans to access and former ones temporarily closed off, new procedures and protocols, new ideas, new volunteers and interns for autumn, scheduling changes, and even, well, things like one minute someone has their ear and the next, they don’t. Change, expected and unexpected, is always occurring, just on a more obvious level these days. And now, on this last official day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, we seem to have moved straight ahead into autumn. (Though in my book, I’d be thrilled with nine months of autumn).
I think as humans, or at least as this human, we often expect, or at least prefer some things to remain the same, predictable. But even though we celebrate things such as the transitions of one season into the next, if we’ve been paying any attention at all we’ve seen all the tiny every day things that lead us ahead into the next phase of life. With breaths of fresh air, new inspiration, new beauty to appreciate, new beings to love.
The chimpanzees last day of summer was a cool, rainy one here. It worked out well enough as they were all busy supervising the many humans working hard to expand their outdoor habitats which will be bringing new experiences to them in the days to come. Along with hopeful new friends and family when we soon begin introductions. Always changing, always growing.
The evening air is filled with the slowing song of crickets and frogs while the dark of night is increasingly alive with geese calling as they pass overhead on their way south. The chimps are all tucked into their blanket nests for the night, I suspect milling over their own thoughts and anticipation of change. May your hearts be as full from the beauty and bounty of summer as you’ve helped the chimpanzees’ to be, as you listen to the last sighs of summer rustle the changing leaves of autumn.
I had these photos of beautiful Foxie saved to share with you, which just happen to be pre-ear biting incident. She’s still just as beautiful. 🙂
If this video doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will. Honey B continues to reveal more and more of her unique personality.
As caregivers, we all love to write and talk about the best aspects of chimpanzees. We celebrate each chimpanzee that we know as an individual and of course cannot help but compare them to ourselves. Like humans, chimpanzees form deep friendships, they play and laugh, grieve their lost love ones and generally display the same wide range of emotions that we do. It’s no wonder that we all find them to be so deeply fascinating and relatable.
This brings me to today’s blog post, the other side of the chimpanzee “coin.” When we talk about both humans and chimpanzees, we cannot always separate out the good facets of our nature from the negative ones. The truth is, chimpanzees (like humans) fight. They have disagreements, hold grudges and can sometimes appear to be incredibly irrational to outside observers. They can also hurt each other (even those that they are incredibly close to). When we watch the chimpanzees fight and argue, we see them express themselves in the most intense and dramatic ways possible. They scream and they hit, they bite and they kick. Despite the perceived drama, most arguments at the sanctuary do not end with an injury. But sometimes they do. Yesterday, good friends Burrito and Foxie got into a fight. While the conflict was resolved relatively quickly, Foxie lost a large part of cartilage from her left ear. Luckily, the injury appears clean and she doesn’t seem to be particularly upset by the loss (chimps are TOUGH). Apart from some pain and swelling management (using oral medications), we shouldn’t need to do any medical intervention. As you might imagine, Foxie does look a little different now.
Here she is exploring Young’s Hill with her new troll doll this morning:
You may also have noticed that having missing portions of ears is not unique to Foxie. Negra and Burrito have also sustained similar injuries in the past. We have always known them to look this way:
Quick fights that end with injuries like these ones are also great reminders of why chimpanzees make terrible pets and why humans never go in the enclosures with the chimps. They’re also great reminders of how forgiving chimps can be. Yesterday, Diana spotted Foxie and Burrito grooming together probably 10 minutes after the fight was over.
“Forgiveness is the final form of love.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr
Everyday we have a different theme for enrichment. For example, yesterday was cover the floor day where we literally covered the floor with items such as blankets, toys, and forage! Today just so happened to be Jamie project day! There are so many different projects Jamie enjoys, most have to do with construction, power tools, the gator, and so on. So we settled on a few things, some reading material, a new tool set, and a new puzzle too! Our kind donors donated new toys off our Amazon wish-list!
Jamie seemed quite pleased with these new tools, but Jamie really had her eye on the tomato garden!
Jamie brachiated her way over:
And than sauntered by to tell me know it was time for tomatoes:
Meanwhile Annie, Jody, and Burrito groomed each other and stared off toward the chute:
Yesterday the chimps also got wood wool, which they made beautiful nests with. Each nest was different, some intertwined, some on top, and some not used at all (also very messy):
Jody enjoyed some morning sun:
Mave and Willy B spent a little bit of their day grooming each:
Well, I guess Fall is coming whether we like it or not. Today was a pleasant rainy day here at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest (that was a very Washington thing to say). It was the perfect day to nestle into a nice nest, eat some onions, and inspect the new neighbors. Or for the chimps at least. I for one love spending my Fall rainy day under a big heated blanket watching Harry Potter or something to that effect, I am sure Negra could relate!
Even Jamie at some point in the day had succumbed to the rainy day. We found her in the Green House under a batman sheet:
Negra in the Green House this morning:
Later, Neggie and I did a photo shoot in the portrait studio:
Mave got cozy with a big stuffed dog:
Willy B:
If you are worried that the chimps slept all day, do not fret! They spent the majority of the afternoon inspecting the neighbors and observing J.B. and Anthony working outside, lots of commotion was going on!
If you look closely you can see Honey B is wearing a headband around her thigh:
Honey B also decided to try on a glove today:
As highlighted in a recent post, Honey B is already known for her intelligence, energy and creativity. Not only is she an engineer and a philanthropist, but she is also a fashion enthusiast.
Yesterday, she decided that the cloth headbands we provide as enrichment are better suited as waistbands. Interestingly, she isn’t the first chimp to have this innovative idea! As caregiver Kelsi showed us last month, Annie has been wearing headbands around her waist for years.
It would be tempting to suspect that Honey B learned the behavior from Annie, which would be great evidence of cultural transmission between groups of chimpanzees. In the wild, chimpanzee communities across Africa have cultural traditions (i.e., their own ways of doing things) that spread among individuals via social learning. Chimpanzee cultures are rich and fascinating, but may be disappearing. This year, scientists published a paper about the negative effects that human activity may have on the cultural diversity of wild chimpanzees. As chimpanzee numbers dwindle and we degrade and fragment their forested habitats, their capacity for culture catastrophically decreases.
Although the process of cultural transmission certainly exists among groups of captive chimpanzees, it has been difficult to document and is seldom reported. In the case of Honey B and the waistband, it seems unlikely that she learned it from Annie. Annie only wears the improvised belt for a few days or weeks and then ignores them for the rest of the year, and she had already stopped wearing this summer’s edition before Honey B and her friends arrived from Wildlife Waystation last month. It is possible that one of the many videos we showed to the new trio features a scene of Annie sporting the headband-waistband look, but it’s more likely that they both just have similar taste in enrichment and utilize what we give them in novel ways.
With that being said, it will be interesting to see if any behaviors do cross over from one group to the next! Chimpanzees are brilliant and creative, and never stop surprising us.
