With all apologies to our east coast friends, the weather here is gorgeous! Perfect for a lunch forage on the hill today.
Volunteer Lynn decided to fancy things up by making sweet potato stuffed bell peppers, which she, Patti, and Amanda spread on the hill, along with beets and chow for the chimpanzees to find.
Before I forget – today is the last day to purchase Jody label wine from Northwest Cellars, so you should get on that now.
After making your wine purchase, enjoy the photo series below: portraits with mouths full
Though this is a fairly lighthearted photo series, foraging is serious business for chimpanzees. It’s their main job in the wild, making it pretty hard-wired, so searching for food is mentally stimulating and very enjoyable to chimpanzees in captivity.
There was one recent behavioral research study of chimpanzees in the wild that showed chimpanzees use long-term memory (as opposed to merely visual or olfactory cues) to find trees with the largest amount of fruit across fruiting seasons.
I posted a couple of additional photos from today’s forage on Jody’s and Burrito’s respective Facebook pages that illustrate how the Cle Elum Seven also use their long-term memory to check for the spots on the hill where they have previously found food. We humans are a predictable species and the chimps probably have us completely figured out.
In any case, here are a few photos of some of the chimpanzees enjoying the “fruits” of their foraging labor:
Missy:
Jamie:
Jody:
I bet you can guess who:
