Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
I believe that Willy B began this task as a means to make a bunch of noise, which indeed he did. At some point, his motivation appeared to transition into something that perhaps only he could understand.
He’s a weird guy. You’ve got to love him. I know I do.
Earlier this month, Anna revealed a half-sibling pair that we were not previously aware of (see this blog post for details if you missed it, but try to guess first just for fun).
Along with that information, we learned of the actual birthdays for Willy B and Mave!
It’s possible we could have had this information before, but their medical records did not include their dates of birth and I assumed they were unknown. So, I forged ahead and chose celebrated birthdays for Mave and Willy B, like we did for Negra, Jody, Jamie, and Annie, whose birthdays are unknown to us.
If you have a CSNW calendar, or have looked at their individual pages on our website, you might know that Willy B‘s celebrated birthday is coming up on March 1st. However, now we know that his actual date of birth is November 30th (1990).
We chose May 27th to celebrate Mave‘s birthday, but now we know that her actual birthday is September 25th (1989).
So, what are we to do for their celebrations this year?
It seemed only right that this year we celebrate both Willy B and Mave’s “calendar birthdays” as well as their real birthdays. No one is going to complain about two more parties, right?!
Speaking of parties and birthdays, don’t waste any more time if you haven’t yet purchased a limited-edition Cy’s Book Club t-shirt and/or tote bag in honor of Cy‘s birthday on March 12th
Below are some classic photos of these two birthday guys, but first, a very brief story from today. After morning cleaning, Cy was clearly looking for some “reading” material. I brought out a book for him. See photo below of the book’s cover:
I knew there was a risk that Cy would find something in the pages of the book that he found alarming. What I didn’t count on was that he would fixate on the smallest photos. The inside cover of the book features very small images of other books in the series (see below). While he looked closely at those small photos he frequently let out one of his unique “scary image alarm calls.”
Willy B and Rayne immediately came to his side. Based on their reactions, the other chimpanzees in his group are as perplexed as we humans are about Cy’s reaction to certain images, but it’s nice that they want to assist or just be near him when he’s alarm calling at an image in a magazine or book.
Willy B really seems to look up to Cy (we can understand why, propensity to overreact to images aside). Here are a few photos of the two of them together:
As Grace blogged about yesterday, Willy B took a trip to the clinic yesterday to get some stitches in his right nostril. He has recovered pretty quickly from the anesthesia but will still need to spend a few days apart from his group in order to let his injury heal.
Today he got a visit from his friends through the window between the front rooms and the Lupine Playroom. They were thrilled to get a good look at him and make sure he was doing well.
Gordo and Mave doing an inspection:
The busyness of daily care and planning for Hoot! continues here at the sanctuary so please forgive this short little update!
