Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Foxie

Negra approaches her cabin

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As J.B. mentioned in yesterday’s blog, Jackie and I caught Negra approaching her new cabin. Unfortunately I didn’t have our camera on me and didn’t want to miss the shot—so this was taken on my phone. I apologize that it is not the best quality and the chimps are pretty small. But, it is super awesome to see Negra sizing up her cabin and getting reassurance from Foxie and Jody. At one point all seven chimps were in the shot. I thought that was also super awesome so I took a screen shot and labeled all the chimps so you can see them all at once.

I can’t wait until Negra makes it all the way inside the cabin!

 

Busy hill

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Annie may have had Young’s Hill all to herself yesterday, but this morning JB managed to snap 5 of the 7 out there in one frame. Counterclockwise from the top, here’s Jody, Foxie, Missy (on the move, of course), Burrito, and Jamie. Negra was snuggled up in the greenhouse and Annie must have been just out of sight.

 

Mornings

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Mornings are my favorite time at CSNW. The chimps have had their breakfast and they are all geared up to go out and explore Young’s Hill. Unfortunately it is also the time when we clean the enclosures, so we don’t have much of a chance to sit around and watch them. But it’s amazing how much you can witness in just those first few minutes.

This morning, Foxie took a suitcase full of trolls out to the hill.

She later decided to put the trolls on her back as she walked down the hill, the way a chimp mother would carry her infant. As far as I know, three trolls was a personal record for her.

Missy likes to start the day with some athletic activity, especially this time of year. It’s no secret that January in Cle Elum is not perfect chimp weather, but interestingly enough, the Cle Elum Seven seem to prefer spring and fall to the hot summer months and we are actually seeing them go outdoors more now that the temperatures are in the 60’s.

Today, Missy used the handrail on the shaky bridge as a tightrope. This has become one of her new favorite moves. She’s holding a chow bag in these photos. We still supplement the chimps diet of fresh produce, nuts, seeds, and browse with a small amount of a commercially prepared diet. The manufacturer of the chow that we use recently decided to shrink the bicuits to a quarter of their original size, and now it is too cumbersome to serve them directly to the chimps. So we put them in bags. The chimps actually enjoy this, because they can take their chow out to picnic on the hill more easily. Or walk a tightrope with them.

There was a skirmish in the playroom this morning before breakfast. This is fairly typical, because that is the time of day when Burrito tends to display, and he inevitably gets everyone else so worked up that someone ends up mad a someone else. I didn’t see the conflict between Jody and Missy, but it was clear from their behavior later in the morning that they needed to reconcile.

Jody was coming back down the hill with her leftover lemon from breakfast when she saw Missy on the shaky bridge. (Yes, chimps love raw lemons. Raw onions too. We like to serve the lemons after the onions to freshen up the breath.) Jody immediately became pilo erect (hair standing on end) and approached Missy for reassurance.

The two then touched briefly and then Jody went on her way.

Negra came outside this morning but after a few minutes she decided she’d rather be in the greenhouse under a huge pile of blankets. Negra is not a morning person. She’s not really an afternoon or evening person, either. Really, she would prefer to stay in bed all day if she could. If only the staff would bring her meals to her in bed.

Burrito continues to explore more and more of the hill. He is really getting more comfortable out there. Today he climbed up a structure by himself and sat for a while on the end of a beam, taking it all in.

Here he is sitting on the log bridge, showing off some new scars on his wrist. Chimpanzees, especially male chimpanzees, use the back of their wrists to bang on things when they display, and sometimes to bang on other chimps. This is what primatologists refer to as a “backhand thump.” So many male chimps have thick callouses on the backs of their wrists and often some scabs and scars too.

I didn’t intend for this to be a post about each and every one of the chimps, but now I feel bad leaving Annie and Jamie out. Annie just followed Missy around all morning, as she always does, probably wishing that Missy would just sit still for a minute. But Missy is incapable of sitting still.

And Jamie was kind of a loner this morning. It used to be that Burrito would follow her around the hill. I think she enjoyed that. Not the company so much as getting to be the leader. Now Burrito will follow Jody or even venture off on his own as he did this morning. That left Jamie walking around by herself. But she had fun too. Everyone loves the shaky bridge. Maybe we’ll build some more next summer.

 

 

 

“Oh no!” Laundry basket keep away

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Normally we don’t give the chimps laundry baskets, not because they are unsafe (because they aren’t) but because we need them to do all the laundry, to dry all the washed toys, and to have a spot for the day’s enrichment. So, we reserve them for human use only, and the chimps understand that. If they ever get their hands on something they “aren’t supposed to have,” they think it’s pretty funny. Especially Foxie:

 

Baby love

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Foxie and I just spent about a half hour going through her doll collection. I was doing some work in the kitchen when she started making raspberry sounds to get my attention. When I looked her way, she pointed towards the bin of dolls. I went through it to see if there were any obvious new favorites I could pass her way but since I was unsure, I decided to pull out the entire bin so that Foxie could help me pick which one she wanted. We often do this for the chimps so that they get the choice, especially with Jamie who so often knows exactly what she wants. When I walked into the chimp area with the bin of dolls, Foxie took off running, starting a game of chase. We ran around the chimp area for a little while, with me chasing Foxie with her bin of dolls and Foxie spinning and laughing hysterically. We then set up in front of one of the front rooms. I sifted through the bin, pulling out ones I thought she might especially love. Foxie made her choices known by pointing and head nodding and I passed a few select dolls her way. With each one that I passed her, she kissed them and held them to her chest for a moment before turning back to the bin to see what else she could choose. We played “pass the troll” for a while, where she tosses a smaller troll out to me and I tickle her with it or we play chase with it, and then I pass it back. All of this typical, every day Foxie stuff– at least for the last 4 years…

While in the biomedical lab, Foxie was used as a breeder and had five babies, all of whom were taken from her almost immediately after they were born. She was never given the chance to be a mother. A few months after arriving at CSNW, Foxie fell in love with troll dolls, often carrying them around on her back and cradling them like a baby, a love that recently branched out to Dora the Explorer. Her love is complex though, and sometimes we witness her beating her dolls on the floor or with a tool. But a few moments later, she is back to loving and kissing them. We will never know what is going through her head, so it’s hard to say if she truly thinks of them as some sort of surrogate child (though I’m certain Foxie understands they are not real), but after years and years of having her babies taken away from her, it’s such an amazing feeling to be able to not only give her a “baby”, but to have her trust us enough to give it back after a game of “baby” keep away. And it all brings her so much joy! Chimps are resilient– we say it all the time– but after all the Cle Elum Seven have been through, it just can’t be said enough.