Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

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Sanctuary

Scenes From the Day

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And what a beautiful day it has been. It’s 75 degrees and sunny, the grass is lush and green, the wild balsamroot and lupine are flowering, and our Greenhouse fig tree has produced fruit! One fruit, to be exact. What’s the best way to cut a fig into 16 equal portions?

Annie spent the afternoon keeping Negra company, though after a raucous morning of being bullied by Burrito, Annie was just as much a beneficiary of the arrangement.

The chimps largely tuned out the construction activity next door, despite the train of semis dumping loads of boulders for a retaining wall throughout the day. I thought that George would be more concerned about all the noise and the people, but he’s taking it all in stride so far (playing with Dora in the Front Rooms as I write this).

 

The Beauty of Hands & Feet

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I am always fascinated by the dexterity of chimpanzees’ hands and feet. When I worked at the Fauna Foundation, Tatu, who uses sign langue, has these beautiful articulate fingers. So articulate, in fact, she had no problem telling you what your breath smelled like good or bad: “Coffee” or “Onion” or telling you “Hurry, go” “Milk, Cheese, Milk, Milk, Milk” “Drink, Milk, Hurry, Go”. As a going away present, I was gifted this beautiful photo by NJ Wight of Tatu’s hands. It’s a gift I have always cherished. For my non-signing friends, I adore hands clasped together or holding their toes.

So please enjoy a whole bunch of photos of chimps’ hands and toes!

 

Happenings

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Work is finally underway on our new staff, volunteer, and visitor building. I’m excited about this project for several reasons. Selfishly, I’m looking forward to having the master bedroom of our house back after 18 long years of using it as the sanctuary’s main office. In the very early days, the office could only be accessed through our kitchen and dining area. As awkward as that was for Diana and me, it was even worse for the other staff who had to get past our often aggressive Chow Chow, Honey B (for more on the seemingly coincidental fact that we once had a dog named Honey B, click here). We used to leave a bag of bread by the door so that people coming in could throw crumbs and distract her while running to safety in the office. It seemed like a major upgrade when we had another sliding glass door installed.

As for the sanctuary, I’m looking forward to all this new building will provide to our current staff and volunteers—more work areas, real offices, a locker room with separate laundry facilities, and a kitchen and break room—as well as what it will provide to our summer visitors and student interns who come to learn about chimps, caregiving, and the work of sanctuaries like ours. But beyond that, it will also provide a foundation for future growth—for the staff and volunteers that will one day (hopefully soon) be caring for rescued monkeys on these same grounds. After all, there are only so many people I want working out of our bedroom.

This groundbreaking is bittersweet, however, since it requires saying goodbye to a historic barn on the sanctuary grounds. This barn is over 100 years old, which at first didn’t seem that old to this New Englander. But it is downright ancient for Cle Elum, which was at that time inhabited largely by pioneer homesteaders and not the wealthy gentleman farmers of my native Connecticut. These barns were made of the trees that once stood in their place, likely by the same people that farmed the land.

Several years ago, I got interested in the history of the canyon in which the sanctuary sits, and the people that used to live here—people like Big John Taylor and his business partner, known to the locals here as Indian Charlie, who used to turn sheep out on the hills in the late 19th century. The sanctuary’s pastures were said to have been filled with the teepees of the people from present-day Yakima who worked for them in the summers. Big John Taylor’s wife, whose name I don’t know, ran something of a mess hall for the folks that loaded logs down a flume and into the Yakima River. In the process of permitting a new driveway for the sanctuary, I was once sent the original blueprints for our road, Highway 10, which used to be the only road across the state to Seattle. And I was delighted to discover that where the bottom of our driveway currently sits, there was once a train stop and a dance hall. It really was the wild west.

The manger for the cows, including Sparky, Blacky, Little One, Toots, Baldy, and Maud:

The barn was one of the last buildings standing from that era. Unfortunately, it spent the last 100 years sinking into the ground as its log foundation rotted away. As an example of how much it has sunk, the left side of the barn used to house draft horses—these days, I hit my head going through that door. Often. The right side has sloped so much that you feel drunk walking through it. And there’s a good chance that the whole thing is one strong gust of wind or one heavy snowfall away from returning to the earth entirely.

Saddle racks and stalls for the draft horses:

So the barn must go. But we are salvaging the wood so that it can live on in some other form. And I am spending the bulk of this blog post writing to you about a barn instead of about chimps because I feel like we owe it at least that much.

Workers remove siding from the back of the barn:

 

Willy B Decoded

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Willy B is a creative spirit. You could even say innovative. Because of those qualities, he has absolutely no problem entertaining himself! Especially, if what he is doing is loud and slightly chaotic, it’s all the better for him. It’s just an environment he thrives in best. It would come to no surprise that when he keeps himself occupied, the games that he comes up with are just so Willy B coded: bouncy balls being thrown in all directions, boxes being dragged along the floor, slinkies being thrown around, or bouncing a giant tub again the wall. It’s just Willy B!

 

The Plum Tree Bandit

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Someone had been stealing branches from the ornamental plum tree we planted last year at the bottom of the Bray. Our forensics team scoured the ground around the tree for footprints, hoping for a hit off our database, but there were none. The list of suspects was long.

Honey B had the motive.

Willy B had the means.

George was seen in the vicinity on multiple occasions.

And wouldn’t you know, Gordo couldn’t provide an alibi for last Saturday.

One thing was clear—we were dealing with a pro.

My guess is that this tree, kindly donated by volunteer Patti (and destroyed by Rayne), is not long for this world. So I figured I should get some photos while it’s in bloom.

Here’s Mave and Willy B grooming.

And Mave returning from a walk.

Mave invited me for our usual Monday afternoon walk to the top of the Bray today. This has become one of those little rituals that I look forward to each week. But later in the afternoon, I saw that she had set off again all by herself. The only thing better than being included is knowing that she has developed the confidence to do it alone.

Sneaky Guy

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Take it from Gordo: If you can’t be high-ranking, be clever.

Don’t mind me…I’m just up here to enjoy the view. Clearly, you guys got all the fruit, which you obviously deserve, what with being so high-ranking and all. And even if there were fruit up here, which there’s obviously not, I certainly didn’t watch the volunteers put it up there on the roof.

Researchers have argued for decades over whether chimpanzees possess a theory of mind—in other words, do chimpanzees have the ability to know what other chimpanzees know or believe? Like most appraisals of nonhuman intelligence, theory of mind studies have relied heavily on contrived and unnatural experiments carried out in behavioral laboratories and other captive settings. As is so often the case, we force other animals to play on our terms and then dismiss them as unintelligent when they fail to meet our standards. But even in these conditions, with the deck stacked against them, chimpanzees have passed nearly every challenge thrown their way. They regularly demonstrate the ability to understand both the goals and intentions of others (a sticking point is the issue of whether chimpanzees know when another chimpanzee possesses a false belief, as opposed to plain old ignorance).

Of course, not all complex social behavior requires a full-fledged theory of mind, but as members of a social and highly competitive species, chimpanzees clearly benefit from being able to imagine other chimpanzees’ perspectives and adjust their behavior accordingly, especially when they lack the might to impose their will on others. I remember learning in school about “sneaky guy” mating techniques, in which the lower-ranking males invite females for a secret tryst without catching the attention of the dominant males who, if they were to witness the attempt, would likely punish a subordinate for such behavior. How do they do this? It depends on the community, but in some areas, the males simply tear up a leaf in a particular way while making love eyes at the object of their affection.

Gordo is a classic sneaky guy (though his romantic overtures are a bit more explicit!). Always on the lookout for the dominant chimps, he knows what he’s allowed to do in their presence—and what he can get away with when no one is looking.