Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
There are times when Burrito and Honey B take themselves very seriously, maybe Honey B more than Burrito these days, but they both have a lightheartedness that is admirable and contagious.
My takeaways from these clips:
Burrito doesn’t need an audience – he can crack himself of up at any moment.
Just look at the delight that Honey B’s friends/family react with when she is showing the jovial side of her personality. Everyone was on board!
It’s a good lesson for all of us.
They really did play for a good amount of time while Anna and I cleaned their playroom. I was very glad to get the clips I did!
As you can see from the video, the snow from yesterday was short-lived. I saw Annie walking up the stairs to the playroom loft with a big handful of snow. It’s good that they love to eat it!
The video says it all. It was a relief to see Honey B with Rayne and Lucky today and with Dora yesterday. She was different with each one of them, and of course it wasn’t non-stop play, but the play was definitely the highlight!
Honey B is a smart, funny, curious chimpanzee. One of things we have discovered that she loves most is rolling around in paper – it is something so simple that never fails to make her happy. Willy B couldn’t resist her playfulness today (see video above).
As an update to Mave, Willy B, and Honey B’s lack of outdoor habitat adventures, I tried a few different things today to try to encourage them to venture into their outdoor courtyard. 1) I placed some nuts and seeds along the wooden walkway, some within reach of a chimpanzee sitting at the end of the chute. 2) I had the door open to the courtyard when they went into the chute, rather than opening it up once they were in the chute, and 3) I did my best to act super casual (this may not be my forte) and moved away from the chute and even around the corner.
I’m sorry to say that no one ventured out, even with these measures, but when I was out of his sight, Willy B did work up the courage to reach out and very quickly grab a few nuts, which must have felt like a big victory to him.
Even little steps are steps.
Amazon.com recently launched a program called AmazonSmile. You may have noticed there’s a link to signing up on the sidebar of the blog that looks like this:
The simple explanation is that you follow that link and that leads you to a page to sign up for AmazonSmile and designate Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest as your charity to receive funds.
I signed up myself and wanted to explain a little bit more about how it works. The most important thing to know is that, in order for your purchases to help the chimps, you have to login in to smile.amazon.com (instead of just amazon.com) every time you shop.
So, you may as well take that link – smile.amazon.com and bookmark it. Once you’ve designated Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest as your chosen charity, when you sign in to shop it should look like this (yours won’t have the word “prime” if you don’t also use amazon prime):
Then you just shop normally and 0.5% of eligible purchases will go to the chimps! I haven’t shopped around too much to determine what purchases are eligible, but this is from amazon’s FAQ about the program: “Tens of millions of products on AmazonSmile are eligible for donations. You will see eligible products marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” on their product detail pages.”
The donations through AmazonSmile will be made to us 45 days after a calendar quarter ends, so it will be a little while before we know how much we’ll be receiving.
And in case you had the clever idea of buying a bunch of stuff and returning it – amazon is way ahead of you – they will not count returned items in their donations.
Thanks for taking advantage of all of the many ways that you can help the chimpanzees. There are a few more listed here: www.chimpsnw.org/you_can_help/single/help-us-fundraise
And here’s some chimpanzee smiles from your favorite chimp BFF’s Annie & Missy:
Missy and Foxie were having a pretty good time in the greenhouse while the humans were cleaning the playroom today. I took so many photos that I decided to try something new – see the full visual story of their play session in the small photos below.
A couple weeks ago, Debbie posted about the difference between chimpanzee fear grimaces and chimpanzee smiles. This afternoon, Missy and Annie decided to demonstrate the many things that might elicit a smile, otherwise known as a play face.
For example, you might smile if your friend leaped out of the grass and tried to wrestle you to the ground.
Or, you might smile if you were the one doing the leaping.
You might smile if your friend was tickling your toes.
And you might smile if you tickled her right back.
You might smile if your friend chased you across a fire hose bridge.
You might also smile if you were the one doing the chasing. Especially if you went too fast…
…fell off…
…hung upside down…
…and kept right on chasing.
You might even walk away smiling after a move like that.
