Hi to you all and Happy New Year.

Are you ready to hear about our four handsome chimps and how they are settling into their wonderful outside habitat? Well, here goes!

Life in a day of chimps consists of firstly filling those tummies with a great bucket full of fresh fruit, greens and vegetables (only the best will do for these precious creatures). Just to name a few from the menu - we give them apples, pears, carrots, sweet potato, capsicum, cucumbers, turnips, parsnips, oranges, lemons, sweet corn, water and rock melons, pineapple, boiled eggs, lots and lots of different variety of greens and not to forget their drinks of tea, just to name a few. And hey, can you guess what their favourite is? Yes it's bananas and avocado (can’t have too many though, will make them fat).

All the primate team have fun watching them find their breakfast - we don’t like to make it too easy for them so we hide it in logs, under rocks, on the platforms, under bushes and the fun part is spiking it on branches throughout the 3000msq exhibit. Gee I tell you its good exercise for us!

Now after their tummies are full, they have a wander around once more in case they have missed anything. Then there is time for a bit of mucking around, some rope swinging (they really enjoy walking across them), climbing and sitting way up high on top of the posts, some mutual grooming and, oh, I can’t forget about resting.

Sandali is getting so much more confident with the other 3 boys and now joins them to eat. He still likes to be on his own but is never too far way and likes keep them in sight at all times.
Tsotsi likes to follow and do everything that Boyd and Gombe do. He doesn’t like to miss out on anything. He really enjoys playing with Gombe a lot. They give us lots of entertainment watching them. They are really quite rough in a gentle kind of way.
Gombe is settling in so well that he is getting up to some of his old tricks. He is a cheeky and quite cunning.
Boyd just goes with the flow. He can hang with the others or is also happy to sit up high on the poles and ponder life.

Before they go out in the morning we do their conditioning and training by asking them to present certain parts of their body. Boyd and Gombe are experts at this, Tsotsi and Sandali have lots more to learn but are picking it up very quickly. To do this we bring them one at a time through a raceway over the weighing scales, do their training session and release them into the exhibit.

Once the dayroom has been cleaned up, they have access to the inside and the outside areas. They come and go at any time throughout the day. At 4.00pm we call them into the dens to have their tea then they get access to the dayroom overnight. After a long day they can’t wait to make their beds and ready for a snooze.

Cheers for now.


Gale