Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

chimpanzee

In honor of Denise and Richard

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Janet Mattox is sponsoring a day of sanctuary today for the chimpanzees and bovines: “In honor of my wonderful friends Denise and Richard Edelson. Denise introduced me to the chimpsnw.org blog, and it has brought me so much pleasure, especially welcome just now when the news is bleak. Thank you, everyone, cows, chimps, and humans!”

Denise and Richard, thank you for your support and sharing your love of the chimpanzees! This makes a huge difference in their lives.

And Janet, thank you so much for celebrating Denise and Richard and the shared joy the chimps and the bovines have brought to your life! To all our lives. 🙂

Today is a pretty big deal here at the sanctuary as we honor the ten chimpanzees and four bovines who call this their home. It’s the 12 year anniversary of the arrival of Jamie, Jody, Annie, Missy, Burrito, Foxie and Negra, whose honorary 47th birthday we’re also celebrating today! And you can join in all this amazingness with our first ever virtual event, The Queen’s Brunch (live via FaceBook at 11:00 AM PST)!

Negra:

Willy B:

Honey B and Mave:

Jody:

Meredith, Honey, Nutmeg and Betsy:

Jamie, Foxie, Missy, Annie and Burrito:

Happy Animal Sanctuary Caregiver Day!

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Today the sanctuary community is celebrating the fourth annual Animal Sanctuary Caregiver Day. Here at CSNW, we celebrated a day early because our staff were all here at the same time for Honey B’s birthday party and you can’t share pizza and ice cream over Zoom. Normally we don’t eat where the chimps can see us but there’s not enough room for us to maintain our distance indoors. Notice someone spying on us?

Not wanting to leave Jamie out of the celebration, the team finished lunch quickly and went on a run around the hill.

Burrito tried his best to keep up.

This is what impresses me most about our staff and volunteers. We set aside a brief moment for everyone to relax and eat and all they can think about is making Jamie happy.

I also appreciate the thoughtfulness that goes into their work. Yesterday, Honey B had her first birthday celebration here at CSNW, and the staff, led by Chad, our Enrichment Coordinator, spent weeks brainstorming ideas for her party. It’s easy to throw a party, but this had to be a Honey B party. And it was a hit – so much so that Honey B will not let the party end. Seriously, she won’t let us go in to clean up.  I guess we can keep the party going another day? (Update: At dinner she reluctantly let us close off the mezzanine. I made a deal with her that we’d move all the stuff, clean, and then put it all back again. She is pleased to once again be buried in her birthday mess.)

The most difficult thing about being a caregiver is not the physical work, though it can be exhausting. It’s the caring. It’s the relentless searching, day after day, for new ways to make others happy, even though you know it’s never going to be good enough. It is hard and it wears you out. I’m glad we have a day to formally acknowledge the importance of sanctuary caregivers. We are so grateful to our staff and volunteers, and to everyone else in our sanctuary community, for never letting up.

I’m sure this guy is grateful, too.

Tomorrow we celebrate the 12th Anniversary of the arrival of the Cle Elum Seven and Negra’s 47th birthday with our first ever virtual celebration. We hope you will celebrate with us! Join us on at this link for The Queen’s Brunch Facebook Live virtual event at 11:00 am Pacific Time on June 13th (you don’t need to have a Facebook account to watch!).

Twelve Years Ago Today

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I am not very nostalgic, and I’m quite bad at remembering and acknowledging anniversaries and birthdays within my personal life (sorry friends and family).

I’m also not the most patient person. I tend to just plow ahead into the future, driven by a feeling of urgency that time is passing and there’s a lot to get done.

Today, however, I was struck with some deep nostalgia thanks to Facebook reminding me of a post I made on my personal page this day twelve years ago.

It simply said, “is anxiously awaiting seven chimpanzees”
(this was back when many people bizarrely worded their Facebook status updates in the third person – it was a thing, it wasn’t just me).

Wow, did that memory ever bring back some feelings.

Here I’ve been plowing ahead in my usual fashion, anxiously preparing for our upcoming first-ever virtual event on Saturday, without taking the time to truly contemplate what the event is celebrating, all that has occurred between that date twelve years ago and now, and all of the people who have been a part of the sanctuary during those years.

This nostalgia drove me to the blog. I posted twice on the blog on this day twelve years ago.

The first post was a brief thanks to those who had attended our housewarming party days prior, an update that founder Keith and J.B. had visited the chimpanzees at Buckshire (J.B. had made a point of telling me that Negra was great and was going to love her new sanctuary home), and a reference to an article that has long since disappeared from the internet.

The second post was the first report from the road! Keith and J.B. were following the truck that was transporting the seven chimpanzees from Pennsylvania and the post included a photo of the truck and trailer that held those seven precious lives and one of Jody in the transport cage on the truck.

In just a few days we will be celebrating twelve years of sanctuary for this ragtag group of seven chimpanzees who have embedded themselves into the hearts of people who have gotten to know them both in person and at a distance through this blog.

We will be celebrating Queen Negra’s 47th birthday. We will be celebrating the addition of the three Californians who joined us less than a year ago.

And we will be celebrating all of forages, naps, play sessions, and adventures that the next year, and even the next twelve years, await these chimpanzees and future chimpanzees who will call Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest home.

I hope you will join this celebration, The Queen’s Brunch, on Saturday at 11:00am PT. You can set a reminder via Facebook right now. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to watch even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Originally, Saturday’s celebration would have involved a party for the chimpanzees and a separate in-person gala event in Seattle for about 200 human attendees.

With the pandemic, we had to pivot to an online virtual celebration.

Our budgeted fundraising goal for the original in-person gala was $200,000. Not knowing when we pivoted (and still not knowing!) what to expect from a virtual event and what will come of our postponed gala very tentatively scheduled for September 18th, we set the fundraising goal for The Queen’s Brunch at a much more modest $50,000.

Thanks to everyone who has donated and bid on online auction items so far, we are inching towards half of that goal as I type this.

I’m still plowing forward because there’s a lot to be done and a lot at stake.

But I will certainly take a break to celebrate Honey B’s birthday tomorrow! In addition to all of the lovely details that Katelyn wrote about on Monday, did you know that Honey B has a particular nesting style? It’s related to her sarong-wearing that Katelyn mentioned. After creating her nest base, she takes a blanket and wraps her lower half in it, tucking herself in perfectly.

Then she’s ready for sleep

Thanks to Earthrated for the new cozy green blankets.

I will also take some time to think about just how much has transpired since the day that truck pulled up in the driveway with seven chimpanzees who had no idea what was ahead for them.

truck pulling up driveway with chimps

I will especially think about the last twelve years of sanctuary for the chimpanzee who will always be my queen.

This is one of the very first photos I took of Negra at the sanctuary:

And this is the photo that Anna took of her a few years ago that we’ve been using as part of the logo for The Queen’s Brunch (available in pillow form to buy now).

Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who has been a part of her life and a supporter of the sanctuary at any point during the past twelve years and even before, when it was all just a dream.

Hi, I’m Mave!

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Mave has been in such a fantastic mood lately. She has been grooming a lot with Honey B and Willy B. She has been very playful, playing chase with caregivers, full contact wrestling with her roommates, spinning around on the floor, even climbing the caging so she can to meet the caregivers at eye-level to show off her amazing play face and presenting her belly. I didn’t have the camera on me at the time, and Katelyn and I weren’t able to pull our phones out quick enough to catch it yesterday. So here’s a photo from a couple weeks ago during one of our play sessions. You would just have to image her with that face, but high on the caging to meet eye-to-eye before jumping down and engaging in another game of chase.

One other sign Mave is getting into a playful mood is with her fashion choice. When she is playful, she usually plays with a sock or puts it on as Kelsi mentioned in Mave’s birthday blog. Recently, she has been loving these fruit themed socks we have in our enrichment inventory.

Mave with a strawberry sock.
Mave with the grape sock.

And today, she decided the banana sock was today’s choice after a rousing game of chase.

Once her sock was on, the game of chase continued.

There are only two other fruit sock variations left I have not been able to catch a photo of her with: grapefruit and pineapple. I have seen her wear or at least interact with them, just haven’t been able to capture them on camera.

Speaking of two different variations, have you seen the Mave shirt available on the Queen’s Brunch Online Auction? There is a brown version and a blue version. I am super thrilled with how these designs came out and can’t wait to get mine.

Be sure to register for the Queen’s Brunch to ensure you receive updates on items added to the auction.

Mave and Honey B grooming in their pink car fort.

Happy Birthday, Donna!

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A day of sanctuary was sponsored for the chimpanzees by Donna Dinsmore who shared this sweet note: “This is my birthday and I would love to have the chimps celebrate it with me!”

Donna, thank you so much! We so appreciate your inspiring and generous heart and the lasting difference you’ve help make in the chimpanzees lives. All of us here hope you have the happiest of birthdays!

Miss Jamie:

Burrito:

Jody:

Mave and Honey B:

Being Honey B

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Miss Honey B (amazing photo generously shared by Chad!):

When Honey B first arrived it was hard not to hold onto the anticipation of her meeting her mother, Missy, for the first time since she was mere hours old to the world. As you may recall, they were separated within hours of Honey B’s birth in the lab. We often shared that it would be highly unlikely they’d remember one another. But we all hoped they would eventually grow to have a wonderful relationship of their choosing.

But to be honest, back when we were attempting to integrate Honey B, Willy B and Mave with the seven, Missy and Honey B weren’t too keen on one another or their new found circumstances. At all. Missy became an uncharacteristic ship lost at sea without her familiar harbor of Jamie (who hadn’t yet been introduced into the equation at the time). I remember her once anchored to a corner of the catwalk in the playroom, Annie tucked behind her with her head resting in dismay on Missy’s shoulder as they looked out with uncertainty over what must have felt like stormy seas. On the other side of the playroom, Honey B seemed to vacillate between rocking anxiously in the corner, and randomly launching provocations and attacks upon her new roommates, seemingly in a get-them-before-they-get-you tactic at self-preservation in a flood of sudden changes with what probably felt like no life raft. But outside of a few hopeful, immensely endearing interactions, Missy and Honey B largely avoided one another during their brief time together. And that’s okay. It was their choice and their comfort level. After all, they were strangers to one another. And that seems like yet another lifetime in some ways.

Honey B’s been here, along with Willy B and Mave, for going on ten months now and she’s an entirely different person. The “Californians” as they’re sometimes known, by all measures seem to be growing in leaps and bounds in comfort, joy and courage, settling more and more into their lives here, as well as showing us more and more of their amazing personalities with each passing day. I recently realized how much I used to think of her in terms of being Missy’s daughter. She’s kind of a longer, stretched out version of Missy (who has an amazingly compact and athletic little bod). And as you’ve probably gathered by now, they are both extremely intelligent and definitely share their skills of athleticism. Though when Honey is sitting just so, oh she looks like her mama. But really, they aren’t particularly similar to one another personality wise. And while Honey is her mother’s daughter, if you only see her through that wonderful aspect, or scenarios that are emotionally appealing to us, it’s faulty metaphor that risks eclipsing the incredible light she is. Because Honey B is entirely and magnificently her own amazing person. Honey is unique, intense, quirky, creative, surprising, highly intelligent and entirely endearing. She delights us on the daily.

And is nearly impossible for me to get a photo of because she immediately wants to get up close and personal (just another of her delightful qualities):

Not long after the start of the pandemic and our increased safety and health protocols for wearing PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) in the chimp house, Chad observed Honey B with a gift bag covering her mouth and the handles looped over her ears. She loves (in a very uncharacteristically chimpanzee way) to offer her food to share with her caregivers. Lately, she’s been trying patiently to teach us how to groom her “properly” by demonstrating and then passing us the grooming tool. If we don’t do it to her liking, she gently asks for the tool back, demonstrates again, and then returns the tool to us to try again. She loves to play wild games of chase, scoot (or skateboard) through her home on her scooter, flail about madly in heaps of paper, toss her enrichment items through doorways with wild abandon, and wear things around her waist like, aprons, blankets sarong-style, waist bands Annie-style, and fanny packs, purely Honey B-style. One of her favorites has been a sky-blue fanny pack with narwhals on it. Narwhals! I’m pretty sure she is going to single-handedly bring back the fanny pack.

This Thursday we get to celebrate Honey B’s first birthday here at the sanctuary. She’s going to be 31. How we ever got so lucky to have her here with us I’ll never know. We feel that way about Mave and Willy B, and well, each of the chimps of course, but I’m thinking of Honey B just now. What cosmic cards were dealt all these many years later that brought her here, of all places? Who knows. And my heart twinges at the thought of the wonderful caregivers whose hearts had to watch her go, who cared for her for so many years, who love her. I know she’s missed. How could she not be? An immensely special place has blossomed in my heart for Honey B. Because she’s Missy’s daughter and I love her momma so much. But increasingly so, so much so, because she is Honey B. Her own incredible chimpanzee person. I just love her and I’m so glad we get the privilege of knowing her.

And if you haven’t had a chance to check out all of the amazing items we have listed for our online auction and our first ever virtual celebration (in part) of Negra and Honey B’s birthdays, The Queen’s Brunch, you can head over tout de suite and see this endearing portrait of Honey B by Margaret Parkinson.

A goodnight smooch from Honey B, herself:

Happy Birthday, Karen!

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Julie Olson, and her sister, Karen Olson, have been a such wonderful friends of the chimpanzees for years, and today, Julie is sponsoring a day of sanctuary in honor of Karen:

“I want to sponsor a day for the chimps for my sister Karen’s birthday. She is the one who introduced me to the fact that the chimps arrived in Cle Elum in 2008. She is a huge animal lover and I know this is more meaningful to her than any present I could give her.”

Julie and Karen, you’ve both made a lasting difference in the lives of the chimpanzees and we’re so grateful to have you as part of their family. We’re thrilled to be able to celebrate your special day with you, Karen, and hope you have the most beautiful time of celebration! Happy Birthday from all of us here!

Burrito, always the life of the party: