Burrito is a handsome guy. When you see a face like this:
you might think it belongs to a suave and dignified gentleman. But Burrito has a silly side. In fact, he’s all silly side. And he, like the rest of us, loves a good slinky.
Cle Elum 7
Taking it Easy
The pace of life in central Washington is different from what you might be used to experiencing on a daily basis. Slower, warmer, and quieter certainly come to mind, pastoral, if you will. In this context, the peaceful ease that the chimpanzees share with one another can be taken for granted. But their ability to relax with as much abandon as they do everything else is remarkable and, truly, a joy to behold. No matter what kind of day you may have had, take a moment to stop and relax with the Cle Elum Seven. They’ll show you how it’s done!
Burrito…no words necessary
This guy.
Close-ups
Yesterday during the streamer maze party, I caught some close-ups of the chimps’ beautiful faces.
Jody:
Missy:
Negra:
French Dora peeking out from behind Foxie’s ear:
Streamer day
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:
and even Foxie (who doesn’t usually build nests) started to make a streamer nest, too!
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:
Jody also un-characteristically swung on a firehose up to one of the windows in the greenhouse (she’s not usually that agile).
This isn’t a great photo of Annie, but really shows how awesome our streamer maze was:
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.
Gifts From Friends
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.)
When Foxie’s mouth was too full of food, she tossed Dora on her back for safe keeping.
Thanks to Diane and Syd for always enriching the chimps’ lives in unique and special ways.
How time flies
I was just telling JB yesterday, I can’t believe it is just two weeks away from our six year anniversary! Wow. How is it almost half-way through 2014 already? Well the saying rings true here at the sanctuary—how time flies when you’re having fun. 🙂
Perhaps it’s on my mind because we’re going to start doing 100 Happy Days next week, but I’ve been thinking about all the really great memories from the last six years! I’m curious what YOUR favorite happy moments are. Comment here with your most favorite memory (and if you have it bookmarked already, give us the link to the blog post about it, so new readers can look back with us!)
Here’s some photos I found from this month that hadn’t been posted before, of the seven amazing chimpanzees we’ve had the pleasure of caring for during the last six years.
I’m looking forward to hearing what your favorite happy moments are!
