Monday 30 May 2011

A visit to the Chimp Sanctuary

Only an hours drive from the Ship is the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, so we thought we'd pay them a visit. Admittedly this was a few weeks ago, but there has not been much time to blog recently. They do tours twice a day, have a quarantine area, nursery enclosure and then a couple of large enclosures for the older chimps (the largest is 8 acres so we couldn't even see any chimps in that one - they are still fed, but they partially fend for themselves too). We saw some of the chimps being fed, some stealing food from anothers mouth, chimps playing, grooming each other, one threw a stone at us and one had a baby on her stomach. There are currently 96 chimps living there, all rescued, mostly from people keeping them as pets. They do have an opening for one named Samuel, but Sam wasn't able to come so no danger of getting him confused with the chimps :-)
 The nursery enclosure where young chimps can stay for a year or so before they move to one of the larger enclosures
 not quite sure if they are cute or ugly!
 helpful instructions about how to talk chimp!
 Our little chimps had a lovely visit. It is quite suprising to find this kind of place in Africa.

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