A day in the life: Elephant doula

OK, not quite, but I’ve gotten 4 calls this weekend in regards to monitoring an elephant pregnancy (related to the trip I made to Melbourne Zoo a few weeks ago). There was a bit of a false alarm this weekend and their head vet is away, so essentially I got this call saying “What do you think – is she starting to go?!?” We checked over the hormone assay results and ran a few more tests, and it turns out she’s not going, yet. My guess right now is that she’ll give birth on New Year’s Day. We’ll see!