Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Enrichment

Paper bag day

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First off—today is the Doggie and Troll Olympics! The games are currently underway and although I wish I could be there to enjoy all the fun, Katelyn, myself, and volunteers Connie and Annie are here with the chimps having fun of our own. (If you weren’t able to join the games today, consider making a donation in Foxie’s honor—the troll games, after all, are about Foxie’s love of troll dolls and an early celebration of her August 8th birthday!)

We’re always trying to come up with interesting enrichment themes for the chimps. The other day I noticed how many paper shopping bags we had collected and thought it would be fun to fill them with enrichment and seal them closed so the chimps would have to open them like presents.

Jamie, of course, loved that project—but to my surprise, Burrito found paper bag day to be a big hit! He used them to display with, which is very helpful if you’re a male chimpanzee. And then he methodically went through one bag, but by the time I grabbed the camera, he had emptied it and was using it as a pillow. Who knew paper shopping bags could have so many uses!

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An icy smorgasbord

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We are at the peak of a long heatwave here at the sanctuary with temperatures hovering in the triple digits for the past week. I found Negra enjoying a moment of peaceful solitude in the still cooler greenhouse early this morning:

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But it doesn’t take long for the greenhouse to get too warm on days like this. Much like the humans, the chimpanzees find it too hot to do much of anything and have been spending a lot of their time in the cooler playroom. (Though Jamie still manages to power through her daily walks in the midday heat!). So we thought today should be an ice-filled enrichment day to help keep everyone hydrated and cool.

The chimpanzees love ice so we filled their wading pool, gardening table, wheelbarrow, and buckets with several bags full and then volunteer caregiver-in-training, Sandra, tossed in a few cherries, frozen raspberries from the chimps’ garden, and sunflower seeds to jazz up the forage. There were pant-hoots and food grunts galore.

Burrito was pretty overwhelmed at first and didn’t seem to know where to begin:

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But he made good use of those fabulous prehensile lips of his:

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Missy and Jody joined Burrito (though Jody was avoiding the paparazzi today):

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Missy LOVES ice and she didn’t leave this spot for some time:

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Foxie made the rounds of the ice smorgasbord, taking mouthfuls from several locations:

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Then for the second frozen course, volunteer caregiver, Steph, showed up with frozen water bottles filled with strawberries and cucumbers! These were a huge hit and Foxie got right to work on these as well:

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Annie enjoying hers in the greenhouse:

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Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to get any photos of Jamie, but she was beside herself with so much to do and at one point was seen drinking from one of many bottles she had collected and scrubbing the front rooms with a brush and bucket of water (at the same time, of course).

And while this is not a great photo I couldn’t resist sharing Negra, with perhaps the biggest mouthful of all!

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Jamie’s in Love

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When Jamie gets a new pair of boots, they become an object of obsession for awhile. She carries them everywhere, and if she’s separated from them, she grows anxious. She often incorporates favorite boots into her nests along with her blankets. This morning she took a nap in the front rooms and snuggled up with her most recent favorite pair.

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Jody has her own style

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As many of you know, Jody has lounging in comfort down to a fine art. She is a woman who feels very comfortable in her own skin and always knows exactly what she wants. It brings us so much joy to see how self-assured she is. Yesterday Jody chose to make a nest in the chimpanzees’ plastic turtle wading pool while enjoying the view from the barn doors and Lisa was able to get some photos:

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We try to provide the chimpanzees with a variety of enrichment each day and it’s their choice to use it as they please, or ignore it. Jody, and all of the chimps, are so creative and unique with their choices and it’s always a joy to see what they come up with. Today Jody has enjoyed wearing a rainbow sock on her foot and has somehow managed to keep it on all day:

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I love this lady’s style.

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Everybody Nest Now

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I recorded several clips of happy nesting today. Like wadging, which was the subject of yesterday’s blog post, nesting is a fundamental behavior for chimpanzees both in the wild and in captivity, which is why we make sure that the chimps always have lots of materials (blankets and straw are favorites) so they can choose to create their beds no matter where they are. Watch the video below!

Streamer day

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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:

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and even Foxie (who doesn’t usually build nests) started to make a streamer nest, too!

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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:

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Jody also un-characteristically swung on a firehose up to one of the windows in the greenhouse (she’s not usually that agile).

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This isn’t a great photo of Annie, but really shows how awesome our streamer maze was:

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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.

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Foxie with a new troll and outreach updates

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If you are active on our Facebook pages and like to see updates about the chimps there—I have some important news! We have decided to share more photos of the chimps on our main page and close down the individual chimp pages, so it’s all in one place and more people will get to see stories about the Cle Elum Seven. We have made dedicated photo albums of each chimp and will be transferring photos from their individual pages to these albums this week.

We’re also going to participate in the social media challenge of 100 Happy Days. The idea is that for 100 days in a row, we will post a picture of something that represents happiness for the sanctuary. Really, every day is a happy day in sanctuary, so this shouldn’t be too hard! We will use the hashtag #100HappyDays so that any other person participating in the challenge will see our posts, too. I think it will be a lot of fun and I hope you all will enjoy it. We will do the majority of the posts on our Instagram and Pinterest pages, but will post them to our Facebook page as well once a week. Even if you don’t use those social media sites, you can still view the photos!

As a side, we are SO close to reaching 10,000 likes. How awesome would it be to reach that goal? Anytime you like, comment, or share a post from our page you help to get more friends for the sanctuary, and we can always use more friends! I’m making it a personal goal to reach 10,000 likes by the end of the 100 Happy Days. Even if it means I have to hunt down another 300 friends just to make it! But something tells me that with all our wonderful and caring supporters, it won’t be too hard to get you all to share some of our posts and encourage yours friends to like the page.

Anyway, on to the most important part of this post—Foxie with a new troll! 🙂

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