Back together again!!!

6 more hours until we're all done with this stupid long-distance thing! Just thought you'd like to know.

Perks of the job

The two African elephants at Western Plains Zoo are in training, which is a lot of fun for all the employees. They're being trained to go on walks, but to fully appreciate this, you have to picture the scene: we are out in rural Oz, and the zoo has a ton of property - several acres of which aren't even used for anything. So the elephants go for a short walk through the zoo

and then get to roam around this huge expanse of grassland. They aren't on leads or anything - just under voice control of the keepers.

For now, only employees are allowed to tag along, so the other morning I went on an ele walk. I can't even explain how cool it is - you're hanging out within touching distance of these 2 elephants that are, for all practical purposes, free.

The 4 ele keepers and I spent about an hour letting Cuddles and YumYum do their ele thing - which mostly involved eating.

Two of the keepers have this push-up contest going, so that morning they decided to take it to a whole new level. Literally. One of them got Cuddles to boost him up with her trunk, and he did push-ups on her back. It's such a surreal thing to be watching these huge elephants peacefully grazing in the distance one second, and then be hoisting a full-grown man around the next.

No matter where you fall on the debate of whether wild animals or captive animals are better off, I think these 2 elephants are the luckiest in the world.

It's a boy!!!

...and I totally called it! I got the gender and the delivery time right! Yup - Australia is celebrating its first Asian elephant birth. Our lab is monitoring all 5 Asian elephant pregnancies in AU ...well now just 4. (So yes, you could say I cheated a bit, but does that really matter?) So a little boy was born at Taronga Zoo (the sister zoo to the one I work at) at 3:08am on July 4th. You can see more pics here - it's really cute.

(one year)

Ben has now been in Australia for a whole year, and Ani will reach her 1 year mark in 2 days. However, I have made the executive decision that we will celebrate our 1-year Aussie Anniversary together, so it will be the day that the 3 of us were reunited (i.e., when I arrived in Oz). I figure that's fair since Ani spent most of that time in quarantine and Ben didn't do too much exploring before I got here. So you can save your happy anniversary cards for a little longer.