See the moment a 28-year-old lab chimp glimpses the open sky for the 1st time

A chimpanzee looking skyward — The blissful moment when Vanilla, a 28-year-old chimpanzee, sees the sky for the first time in her life. (Image credit: Courtesy Save the Chimps)

Vanilla, a 28-year-old chimpanzee, has lived her entire life in captivity without an unobscured view of the sky. But now, a heartwarming new video shows the great ape seeing the sky for the first time at an island chimp sanctuary in Florida.

For a portion of her early life, Vanilla lived inside a New York biomedical research facility, where she and dozens of other chimps (Pan troglodytes) were housed in small cages "suspended from the ground like bird cages," according to a statement from Save the Chimps, a sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida, that rescued her and 29 of her peers.

"In California, Vanilla lived with a handful of chimps inside a chain-link-fence cage with no grass and very little enrichment," Andrew Halloran, a primatologist and director of Save the Chimps, told the New York Post.

After the Wildlife Waystation closed, Vanilla and members of her cohort came to Save the Chimps via a FedEx airplane that's part of FedEx Cares, a global community engagement program, before arriving to the organization's sanctuary in a semi-truck.

After spending time in quarantine, a standard procedure at the sanctuary, the chimps were gradually introduced into one of the facility's larger family groups, according to a statement.

In the recently released video, Vanilla, at first hesitant, can be seen leaping out of a doorway and embraced by Dwight, a male chimp. Throughout the clip, she repeatedly looks skyward as she explores her new grassy, open-air habitat on the 3-acre (1.2 hectares) island.