Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Foxie

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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Gifts From Friends

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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.)

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When Foxie’s mouth was too full of food, she tossed Dora on her back for safe keeping.

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Thanks to Diane and Syd for always enriching the chimps’ lives in unique and special ways.

How time flies

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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.

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I’m looking forward to hearing what your favorite happy moments are!

Games with Foxie

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Okay, okay — I know I just posted a bunch of Foxie photos yesterday, but this video was just too much fun to not post. So, here she is, the nearly 38 year old chimp who is going on six. 🙂

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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Friendships

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It’s Friend Friday! Okay, well, we may have made that up last week—but it turns out that it actually is a thing! So, we thought we’d keep the trend going and post about some friendships today.

This morning I got a video of rambunctious play between Foxie, Diana, and Burrito. At one point, Burrito turned toward Foxie and they started to play with each other. This is really important for their bonding, and we as caregivers tend to take a step back and let them play on their own. You’ll see in the video that Diana did just that. Later on, Jody joined in too, and started to play tug with Foxie. Foxie looked toward Diana to keep playing with her, but Jody was so insistent that Foxie play with her that Diana encouraged Foxie to direct her attention back to Jody.

This is a little bit longer than the videos I usually post, but the whole thing was so great I had a hard time cutting anything out. Enjoy, and please share on social media with the hashtag #FriendFriday!

Photos from today and Negra’s Journey

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Check out this post on One Green Planet we posted today about Negra. It’s truly a wonderful story and we’d love it if you would share it on social media, or just forward the link to your friends!

Here’s some pictures I took today — the weather is absolutely gorgeous so we set up a quick lunch forage for the chimps to enjoy!

Foxie:

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Burrito:

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Jamie checking out some welding work J.B. was doing down at the caregiver house:

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And then she took her pile inside to enjoy and let me snap this nice head shot of her:

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