Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
The chimpanzees are currently busy snacking on a giant tub full of snow in the greenhouse.
Burrito:
Foxie:
Meanwhile, volunteer caregivers Denice and Seana are busy preparing today’s lunch plus cooking up a storm for the feast tomorrow and wrapping presents delivered by the Ellensburg Santa.
Tomorrow is going to be a great party at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest! Thank you again for all who have contributed to the chimps’ happiness this week and for the last four and a half years!
As we’ve mentioned before, grooming is an important aspect of chimpanzee culture. Between lunch and dinner in the afternoon is probably the most popular time for grooming among the Cle Elum Seven.
Even though she’s the boss, Jamie is not always the center of grooming. Missy grooms Jamie fairly often (see some photos from about a year ago on this blog post).
But Burrito is a less frequent grooming partner to Jamie.
Today Burrito and Missy were both grooming Jamie at the same time as they all sat in front of one of the windows on the catwalk of the playroom.
Burrito kept looking at me while I was taking photos.
Annie loves snow:
A couple of weeks ago, Diana wrote a blog post about Jamie’s complex personality – sometimes bossy, sometimes playful, sometimes (well, usually) mischievous, but always cool. For example, she probably has the coolest head nod of any chimp I’ve ever met. In terms of chimpanzee behaviors, a head nod means pretty much exactly what it sounds like – approval. Jamie’s head nod is often almost like a chin tip you’d see between bros, almost like what you would do if you were to say, ‘sup. But that’s not all that surprising, because Jamie is pretty much cool at everything she does. I would expect no less from the boss.
Here’s another example of Jamie “playing it cool”. The other day I spotted her in a comfy nest, surrounded by boots and troll dolls – classic CSNW.
Then, she noticed a Dora the Explorer doll nearby and very slowly, very casually pulled it over to her nest.
She seemed pretty happy to have Dora with her, but certainly didn’t want anyone to know she purposely pulled a doll into her nest. In her eyes, it would be way cooler if it just “happened” to be there.
Just 3 days ago, Debbie mentioned how we haven’t really had that much snow this year. She even said “I don’t want to jinx it”. Well, it’s been snowing almost constantly since Friday, so I think we can consider it jinxed! The humans may not be 100% excited about it, but the chimps are! Even Negra has been spending time on the hill eating snow.
J.B. took a really good photo of Negra in profile yesterday and turned the photo into a silhouette. Last night I dreamed of creating the image below. I could try to make this an educational or thought-provoking post about evolution and facial features, but the truth is I just like the image. It looks especially good on a black background. Maybe this should be our next t-shirt…
It’s been another cold, yet sunny day today and a few minutes ago, six out of seven chimps were out roaming on the hill (can you guess who was inside?). As I rounded the corner of the greenhouse to see what was happening out there, I saw Missy just standing in the bamboo with a big playface:
Annie came running out of the raceway towards her, full speed ahead!
Her playful charge was pretty anti-climatic at first…
But it wasn’t very long before Missy engaged Annie, and a wild foot grabbing, tickling, and laughing chase game ensued.
Sometimes, play is serious business.
