Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
Today is Julia Simpson’s birthday, and she chose to sponsor a day of sanctuary in honor of her mother because Julia is grateful to have Amy for a mom. How incredibly sweet is that?
Maybe this sweet?
Negra kissing Jamie’s brow
Foxie kissing a troll doll
Happy birthday, Julia! Thanks for all you do for the chimpanzees, and thanks to Amy for being such a great mom!
It was a nice morning for a breakfast forage on Young’s Hill.
Burrito’s first priority in a forage is always chow. He fills his mouth and both hands, and occasionally his feet too, before moving on to other foods like lettuce and smoothie.
Jody was lucky to find one of the two banana flowers that volunteer Stephanie brought this morning. She carried it with her as she foraged so that she could save the best for last.
Missy always finds the food that we throw up high into the climbing structures. That’s where she found the other banana flower.
Foxie is a smoothie fanatic.
Annie took a few moments to rest on Little Mount St. Helens while she scanned the area for more chow.
Jamie found the cups of smoothie that we hid at the very top of the hill.
She was also quite focused on gathering strawberries.
At first, Negra declined to go outside for the forage, so we gave her a snack in the greenhouse. But we were happy to see her make a brief appearance outside later in the morning.
This has been a pretty big week for Burrito.
Just two days ago, Katelyn wrote about how Burrito has been tagging along when Jamie and her caregivers walk around the hill. It’s a sign of his growing confidence that he’s able to venture further away form the security of the chimp house in the company of other chimps. But yesterday, Burrito decided that he doesn’t even need Jamie’s company anymore. Now he’s the one asking us to go on walks!
All day long, he’s been trying to capture our attention with playful stomps and head bobs. As soon as we approach, he runs up the hill, waiting just long enough for us to catch up before running off again. You can even hear him laughing as he runs.
Nearly seven years after their release from the lab, and three and a half years since their first experience outdoors, we are still witnessing the chimps grow physically and emotionally.
Burrito even played a lead role in a brief patrol today. This afternoon, an unusual bird call could be heard coming from the woods nearby. Jody was the first to check it out, as she often is. Burrito then walked to the top of the hill to join her.
At first, Foxie watched from a distance.
As did Annie.
But soon a group gathered at the top of the hill, and after a brief investigation, they determined that is was nothing to worry about.
So Burrito went right back to his new routine.
I sure hope this continues. I love to see him freely exploring the hill and taking advantage of all of the space that’s available to him. And I’m thrilled that he’s getting so much exercise. But if I’m being honest, there’s one other thing that I’m happy about, for purely selfish reasons:
He doesn’t make us wear cowboy boots.
Jamie got a new pair of boots today. She has a pretty consistent new-boot ritual that I love watching. After we give her the boots, she walks around and gathers blankets and other materials for a nest. She sets the boots aside momentarily while she gets her nest situated.
Once everything is in its place, she can devote the necessary time to inspecting the boots closely.
One thing that has become clear to me during my years of working with chimpanzees: there is often no answer to “why” questions, such as “why is Foxie so enamored with troll and Dora the Explorer dolls?” Or, similarly, “why does Jamie want her caregivers to put on cowboy boots and “join” her on her walks around Young’s Hill?”.
Maybe rarely having access to answers for “why” questions makes the chimpanzees endlessly fascinating. And maybe it also allows us to concentrate on the “what” and the “how” questions, like, “what can we do to enrich Jamie’s life today?” or “how can we make sure that Foxie always has a choice of dolls?”
Today, this was the doll Foxie picked:
The bite test:
The gaze test:
and this is Foxie looking at me holding Dora before the three of us started playing chase:
Why does Foxie like her caregivers to play chase while holding one of her dolls? I don’t know. But, as more time passes, the better I get at figuring out what makes her particularly giddy when we’re playing these games.
To follow up on Elizabeth’s post yesterday, here’s a good example of Burrito’s other side – the testosterone-filled Tasmanian Devil side that leaves a path of destruction and screaming girls in its wake. This is the side we usually see when we arrive to work in the morning.
As you’ll see in the video, Annie was the victim of one of Burrito’s drive-by displays this morning. Being a chimpanzee is stressful, but they have some pretty good ways of dealing with that stress. Like hugs, for example.
One thing you might notice in the video is that Annie also seeks reassurance from me and I don’t offer it to her. As hard as it may be to resist in these instances, we make a conscious decision to avoid inserting ourselves into their social conflicts. If Annie was startled by a loud noise, we would gladly offer her a touch with the back of a wrist to help comfort her. But when she’s involved in a social conflict, we risk upsetting the delicate balance in the group if we inject ourselves, even if it’s just to offer reassurance. At these times, the chimps aren’t just looking for emotional support – they may also be looking for political allies or even backup for an ensuing retaliatory fight. So we try to limit our involvement to a polite acknowledgement in the hope that they will work things out amongst each other. And they usually do.
Besides, no one can comfort a chimpanzee better than another chimpanzee.
Cle Elum’s favorite elk is on the move again.
Ellie, as we have named her (others in town also know her as “Button”), is a wild elk that was separated from her herd at a young age. She found a safe haven in the pasture of a nearby ranch, where she helped herself to the hay set out for the horses and cattle throughout the winter. She’s free to come as go as she pleases, since elk can easily jump the fences typically used to contain farm animals. In the warmer months, when food is plentiful, she wanders the Bristol Flats canyon and the side of Lookout Mountain, and because spring came early to the Northwest this year, she decided to venture over to the sanctuary this week for a visit.
She likes to stop by the sanctuary office to check up on us and the cats:
She also seems to enjoy teasing our dogs. They’ve never met an animal so unmoved by their barking and growling. But that doesn’t stop them from trying.
She greets all visitors to the sanctuary, including unsuspecting repairmen.
Seeing Ellie is always bittersweet. We’d love to see her rejoin a wild herd, but in the few times they have come back through the canyon, she has either declined to join them or was not accepted. In many ways, she probably has the same kind of identity confusion that we see in cross-fostered chimpanzees (chimps that were raised as if they were human). Perhaps she even sees herself as more cow or horse than elk.
But she certainly enriches the lives of the chimps. When they first saw her two years ago, they tried to scare her away from Young’s Hill. But unlike our dogs, they eventually realized that she wasn’t going anywhere, and now they greet her more with interest than with fear or territoriality.
Sandra, a Level 3 volunteer, was walking around the hill with Jamie yesterday when Ellie decided to make an appearance. She and Debbie put together this video:
