Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary for primates.

chimps

A Break in the Action

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Nothing exciting or noteworthy happened today.

That’s an exaggeration. We do, after all, have to manage a newly integrated group of chimpanzees and even the most stable groups of chimps have their drama.

Compared to the last few days, however, today was quite calm. There were some short bouts of screaming and slapping and lots of pant-grunts, but the arguments weren’t as loud and didn’t last as long. Honey B tried to extend one of the arguments by spitting water in Jamie’s face, but Mave acted as the referee long enough for Willy B to scatter everyone with a charge and a display. This situation, along with all the other conflicts, deescalated quickly. I don’t know if this stabilization marks a shift towards acceptance or if it is merely an aberration. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the chimps return to a more boisterous and confrontational state tomorrow.

Either way, today felt like a break and I’m taking what I can get.

Here are some photographs from today, along with a few from the past week. I hope that you all enjoy them.

Jamie grooms Mave this morning.
Honey B takes to the railing while playing with Negra this morning.
Jamie and Willy keep an eye on the Greenhouse today.
Jody pant-grunts at Willy B as he walks by.
Mave gently touches and grooms Jody.
Mave reassures Willy B during last week’s integration event.
Missy watches breakfast from her perch in the Greenhouse this morning.
Nutmeg
Meredith
Betsy
Honey

Honey B’s Style

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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.

 

The New Three

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You guessed it – Willy B, Mave, and Honey B are incredible, and we are all newly in love with them with each passing hour. It’s hard to believe they’ve only been here a few days from Wildlife Waystation.

Click on the video above for some recent clips of the three, and stay tuned for a video of their journey to Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, which we will be showing as part of the Summer Biddin’ online auction that beings August 28th!

Willy B is starting to relax enough to play games of chase and was seen playing with a plastic slinky today. He loves watching videos and looking at photos on our phones. He seems to particularly like photos of Jody. Despite his grand entrance seen in the video he hasn’t been displaying very much. We suspect his displays will increase when he is able to see the other chimpanzees through the howdy door.

Mave, at least on the outside, appears to be most relaxed chimpanzee I’ve ever met. She was even making a nest and lying on her back during the transport! Today, she discovered troll dolls and carried one around with her this morning, tucking it into her pelvic pocket before greeting J.B. She has a way of casually shuffling across the new floors that makes it seem like she’s wearing slippers.

We’ve been told that Honey B is uber smart, and we’re definitely seeing glimpses of that. She has a way of looking right into your soul. She is a very enthusiastic groomer with her new human friends and is very excited when she finds a scab. She’s decided the mezzanine is the place to be and has been nesting up there at night using everything available.

There’s so much more for us to learn about these three chimpanzees, and we’re so glad to have all of you following along so you can get to know them too.

Watching from a Distance

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Hanging out with chimps is fun. Watching them hang out with each other is even better.

Chimpanzees grooming each other. From left to right: Foxie, Annie, Jody, Missy and Burrito

For sanctuary personnel who are trained to engage in protected contact with the chimpanzees, developing close relationships with the individual chimps is undoubtedly one of the most rewarding aspects of the job. I cannot think of another experience that comes close to having Missy approach the caging and ask to be massaged, or being prodded with a wooden tool by Jamie as she inspects your freckles, or stomping around the hallways with Burrito to begin the day. There is something surreal about greeting, grooming, and playing with beings who are not quite human but are definitely something similar. To call these exchanges “perks” would be an understatement.

These aren’t my favorite moments, though.

What brings me the most joy is to see the chimpanzees being independent and going about their activities as if I didn’t exist. A true sanctuary allows chimpanzees to do this, if and when they choose to do so. There are times when I see the chimps foraging way up on the hill, far from the bustle of the Chimp House, and I think that this is how our relationship with chimpanzees would be in a perfect world. Our interactions would be limited to fleeting glimpses in a forest, and chimps would not be kept in captivity or subjected to exploitation. They could go wherever they wanted to go and be whatever they wanted to be.

Missy

Today, Level II volunteer Dusty prepared a mixture of chopped vegetables and chow and we spread these items outside for the chimps to forage. As the chimpanzees fanned out across the grassy landscape and climbed over the maze of wooden structures, keeping them in our line of sight became a challenge. The chimps didn’t seem to notice the group of human visitors sitting at the bottom of the hill, and I felt irrelevant as I tried to observe them with binoculars and capture them with the camera lens.

Jody
Annie
Negra (left) and Missy (right)
Jody

Negra was more interested in exchanging an open-mouthed chimp kiss with her friend Missy, Annie was busy searching for food in the prairie grass, and Jody was determined to collect the rest of the cat-tails and bring them back to the Greenhouse. Missy eventually disappeared in the bamboo, only to reappear minutes later as a fuzzy speck perched high on a shaded platform. Dr. Jane Goodall’s first sightings of free-ranging chimpanzees in Tanzania came to mind. Missy, far off in the distance, didn’t seem too different from the wild apes that Dr. Goodall watched through binoculars from a distant hillside. In many ways, I think that’s the main point.

Missy
Missy (far away)

Even if these seven chimpanzees can never experience life in the wild as their ancestors did, at least they still get to be chimpanzees.

 

 

They Know

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The Cle Elum Seven Chimpanzees spent decades in biomedical research laboratories and holding facilities in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.

The minimum space requirements for housing chimpanzees under the Animal Welfare Act remain shockingly, well, minimal. It’s still legal to keep a chimpanzee in a 5’x5’x7′ cage. These days, however, most laboratories that are still housing chimpanzees allow them to live in social groups and give them some sort of outside access. The National Institutes of Health recommends (though doesn’t require) enclosures that provide at least 250 square feet of space per chimpanzee. As a point of reference, for our group of seven, that’s a total of 1,750 square feet. Think about the size of your apartment or house as a comparison. Now think of yourself having only that amount of space for the rest of your life. Still, 250 square feet is way beyond the twenty-five square-foot cages that the Cle Elum Seven spent much of their lives.

The changes in how labs house chimpanzees came about in part due to pressure from a public that had gained insight into the deep intelligence and social lives of these beings that are so closely related to us.

Beyond just amount of space, providing an enriching, stimulating, interesting environment for chimpanzees is about giving them lots and lots of choices. Even if they only use some of their space a fraction of the time or only pick up a certain object one out of every five times it’s available, simply living in an environment that provides a large amount of variety is a huge part of giving intelligent primates at least some of what they need.

After spending decades in small spaces without access to the outside, I wonder if the Cle Elum Seven could have imagined a place like CSNW with 85,000 square feet of space.

Once they were at the sanctuary, their bodies and their minds knew what to do.

They followed their instincts, put their muscles to work, and got down to the business of exploring.

They reached into their imaginations and indulged in private games and adventures.

They broadened their palate and relished opportunities to search for and gather food.

No one had to teach them to be chimpanzees.

(Just a note about these photos – they were all taken today! The photos include Foxie, Jamie, Annie, and Missy.)

Jody the Harvester

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Jody was quite busy this morning harvesting plants from a mound on Young’s Hill. This particular mound has been producing more and more edible vegetation each year.

We call Jody “Farmer Jo” mostly because she collects the fruit and vegetable forages that we spread all over the hill and brings her collections in to the greenhouse in large armfuls, but today she was harvesting the natural plants and eating them as she harvested. And she looked quite beautiful while she was doing it.

Negra Time

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Negra isn’t featured on the blog as much as some of the other chimpanzees because she’s often not part of “the action” at the chimp house (unless it’s spring and she’s outside eating grass – we can’t wait for those days!).

Negra seems to prefer solo quiet time. She also spends a lot of her time high up where it’s not as easy to get good photos and video.

And she operates on her own schedule. While the rest of the group might eagerly line up by the raceway in the morning to get the first pick of the snow, Negra instead chooses to go back to bed.

But then, an hour or so later, we’ll see her with some snow of her own – maybe she ventured out and retrieved it herself, or many she convinced one of her friends to hand over some of their haul (she can be very convincing). Either way, she doesn’t miss out on what each day has to offer, she’s just on Negra Time.