The other night I watched Negra eat dandelions as the sun began to set over Young’s Hill. I wish it could be spring forever.
eat
New heights
Negra wasn’t the only one trying something new yesterday.
As I stood near the top of Young’s Hill, I saw Burrito walking towards me with a sense of purpose. When he reached the top, he turned and went straight for the Twister climbing structure. Without hesitation, he climbed straight up. As far as we can remember, this was the first time he had made it to the very top.
The chimps have been spending a lot of time outdoors lately. Our wet, snowy winter is finally repaying us in the form of impossibly green grass.
Along with the green grass there’s been a bounty of dandelions, and that means that the chimps can step outside and have a snack whenever they want. If the chimps only knew how hard people try to rid their lawns of dandelions…
Queen of the Hill
Negra has spent more time outside today than any of the other chimps. Here at CSNW, that marks the official start of spring.
That’s because Negra is always the first to realize that the spring grass is ready to eat. A rainy March followed by a week of sun and unseasonably warm temperatures turned Young’s Hill once again into a 2-acre salad buffet. The moment Negra decides that the shoots are long enough and sweet enough to pick, she plants her butt down and eats to her heart’s content. And when the other chimps see her eating grass, they start digging in too.
But no one loves spring grass as much as Negra.
Of course, Missy can’t just sit around eating grass all day.
But she took a break long enough to pick a few of the finest blades of grass on the hill.
Serving
I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about serving food for a while now in response to a question I am frequently asked. How do we give food to the chimpanzees if we never enter the enclosures with them or stick our fingers into the enclosures? There are a few different options, including serving the food through the openings in the caging to each of the chimps and setting up forages for the chimps to gather the food themselves.
Serving entails serving food to the chimps’ hand or mouth (or sometimes foot). We make sure to cut foods to a size that will easily fit through the squares in the caging or we can drop food into food chutes (located in the Front Rooms). Things like celery, carrots and cucumbers are easy to hand to the chimps through the openings. Roasted vegetables are softer and we use small paper plates or serving trays that can be rolled up and passed through the openings. Liquids, such as fruit smoothies, (which are served at breakfast) are poured into cups and caregivers hold the cups up to the chimps’ outstretched lips. Serving allows us to know exactly how much each chimp is getting of each food. Check out this link to see examples of meals we serve throughout the day.
The following photos were all taken during the chimps’ dinner from the top of the Greenhouse when the panels were off this past summer. As you can see in the photos, some of the chimps prefer to hang, while others prefer to sit on the ground or utilize the plastic chairs or barrels.
Foxie usually brings a friend with her to meals (hint, look at what is in her foot).
Some of the chimps prefer to stay and eat all of their food where it is served, while others tend to gather their portions and go to a different area to eat them.
Jamie prefers to open her night bag, pour out its contents and pick through the nuts, seeds, popcorn and dried fruit.
Here’s a closeup of Jody eating her celery.
Foraging allows the chimps to move around and gather the food themselves, which is what they would be doing in the wild. For forages, we cut the food into smaller pieces and scatter them throughout the various enclosures after we have cleaned (the chimps are locked out of the enclosure humans are in). Once we have locked up and done our safety checks, we give the chimps access to the enclosure and they gather the food themselves. Foraging gets the chimps moving (important for chimps in captivity) and gives the chimps choices over which foods they prefer to collect and eat first. Click on the link at the beginning of the paragraph for a great video of the chimps foraging on Young’s Hill.
Alfalfa, the miracle weight loss food
If the chimps had their way, they’d eat all day long. Burrito would be unstoppable. Negra would probably forego blankets entirely and just make huge nests out of bread and peanuts so that she would never have to get out of bed again. But overeating is not usually conducive to good health, so for their sake we try to balance these two competing interests as best we can.
Thankfully, there’s a miracle diet food that helps keep chimps happy and healthy: alfalfa. Not just alfalfa, but also bamboo, grape vines, timothy hay, cattails – things that we collectively refer to as “browse”. Chimps love browse, but most browse plants are too fibrous to be digested properly, so they either pass right through or the chimps spit them out after a thorough chewing. Browse makes it possible for chimps to chew to their hearts’ content without eating a lot of calories.
In the summer and fall, many types of browse grow naturally in the chimps’ two-acre enclosure, which allows them to grab a snack anytime they like. Naturally occurring browse is harder to find during the winter, so we make sure to provide Burrito and his family with store-bought treats like alfalfa cubes on a regular basis:
All you can eat
Chimpanzees seem to have a pretty good sense of time. Even if we haven’t started preparing dinner yet, the chimps at CSNW begin to gather near the window to the kitchen around 4 o’clock. They want to see what’s on the menu and remind us to hurry things along. But every once and a while, it remains ghostly quiet as dinner time nears – no one blowing raspberries at us, banging on the caging, clapping their hands, or stomping their feet. When this happens, it usually means one thing: They’ve started on dinner without us.
Chimps in captivity rely on humans for so much. Those who were wild caught, like Negra and Annie, were torn from their families, deprived of their native cultures, and forced into complete dependence on humans. And in some ways, they were the lucky ones, because those born into captivity never even got to experience a moment of independence in their lives. So when they learn to take back a tiny bit of autonomy, as they do when they choose when and what they’d like to eat, it is cause for celebration. And with two acres and a greenhouse full of bamboo and native plants, the chimps are able to make these choices every day.
Eating plants is good for their health, too. Chimps in the wild eat large quantities of rough fiber in the form of shoots, stems, and leaves. And while I don’t think we know yet exactly what role all of these foods play in their diet, we do know that this type if roughage allows captive chimps to snack all they want without putting them at risk for diet-related illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.
There are currently seven species of bamboo growing on Young’s Hill, and the chimps harvest from them year-round. Surprisingly, the bamboo on the hill seems to be prized most for its leaves, and the chimps tend to leave the fragile (but I would imagine tasty) shoots alone.
A few other species of bamboo that are more sensitive to Cle Elum’s chilly winters do very well in the chimps’ greenhouse enclosure, and send up their tender shoots (Chusquea gigantea shoots seems to be a delicacy) as early as March.
But in May, all of Young’s Hill becomes an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Even Negra will sit outside to snack on fresh dandelion greens.
Missy, always on the move, takes hers to go.
Spring grass is a favorite of nearly all the chimps. Annie collects only the best blades to bring back to the greenhouse.
In mid-summer, some larger plants begin to grow. Most people would consider them weeds, but the chimps think otherwise. Jody likes mullein, which I imagine to be the equivalent of eating bitter craft felt, but Jody must have a more refined palette.
Missy and a few others like prickly lettuce, which we mistook for dandelions for a while until we picked up some of their leftovers – they are just as prickly as the name suggests. Just like in the wild, captive chimpanzees will sometimes eat foods that are physically difficult to ingest. While many of the plants consumed by wild chimps have been shown to have medicinal value, such as the anti-parasitical Aspilia leaves, we don’t know if captive chimps are attempting to self medicate or are just eating adventurously.
The bane of my existence is this wild mustard. It grows so big and tough that it will break your weed eater. But when it grows inside the chimps’ enclosure, it gets taken care of by nature’s weed eater, otherwise known as Jody.
The chimps could never live on these plants alone, even if they do supplement with the occasional live frog like Negra does. But they are important in other ways. Like tonight, when the chimps all disappeared onto the hill just before dinner, you could almost hear them saying:
To heck with the humans, let’s eat!
The Real First Day of Spring
March 20th may have marked the first official day of spring, but around here we follow a different calendar. It’s not truly spring until the ever-elusive Negra emerges from her playroom nest to bask in the sun and partake in the delicacy of fresh spring grass.
The first sighting is always accompanied by jubilant announcements over staff radios and a frantic search for cameras to document the occasion.
Of course, Negra has already gone out on the hill for forages this year, but always with a laser-like focus on collecting food and going back to bed indoors as quickly as possible. When spring arrives, she savors her time outside.
For a few short weeks, the grass will be sweet and tender. The cold winds of spring will begin to relent, and the scorching heat of summer will have yet to arrive.
This is Negra Weather™, and we will all relish every minute of it while it lasts. For soon, she will disappear back into the pile of blankets from whence she came, only to reemerge when the conditions are just right.
So, from Negra and all of us at CSNW, Happy First Day of Spring!