Soon we will have some rain in San Diego, hopefully! The pandas at the Zoo’s Giant Panda Research Station really enjoy the cooler weather and their mood changes as they relax more and just hang out while I get wet. It doesn’t make any difference what type of rain gear I have, I always get wet! |inline

Jackaroo (pictured) is a male koala that lives on St. Bees Island, Australia; this is where I traveled to for three weeks during the breeding season (see Bill’s blog, Koala Field Project: Tracking Koalas and Fred’s blog, Koala Field Project: A Koala Chorus). I’ve been writing blogs about smelly koalas (Male Koalas Smell Like Goats?!) and loud koalas (Motorcycles and Koalas), and now I can tell you about the koalas that I saw in the wild. I was hoping to see koalas and maybe hear a few bellows, but was I in for a surprise!
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Nadine continues to share her adventures about studying black-footed cats in South Africa. Read her previous blog, In Search of the Black-footed Cat, continued.

Day nine of trapping and our success rate is 6.67 percent so far, with 24 captures out of 360 traps. The good news? We got a cat! A kitten really, but the elusive Felis nigripes nonetheless. We’ve been spotting every night and have seen at least five adults (only ten are estimated to be permanent residents at this location). Last night, one disappeared into a maze of ground squirrel burrows and the other into an aardvark den. We took turns crawling into it but we were all a bit concerned about meeting up with the aardvark…or a cobra. The den took a sharp turn to the left and then dropped down and it was just impossible to see.

It’s overcast and windy but still warm today. I did laundry, took a shower, and now feel amazingly clean (shower and clean clothes all in the same day!!). I also just finished a cheese sandwich, so things are close to perfect at the moment.

Nadine Lamberski is a veterinarian at the Wild Animal Park.

As a panda researcher, I have tended to specialize in the study of creatures that happen to be black and white. Perhaps it is fitting that when an opportunity arose to study animals far removed from the bear family, the study subjects would, again, be black and white.

The California condor has been one of the most endangered birds in the world. In 1982, only 26 individuals existed. Since that time, researchers from CRES, along with a variety of organizations including the Los Angeles Zoo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and The Peregrine Fund, have been contributing to the growth of the condor population as well as to the release of individuals to the wild. At this writing, there are at least 280 individual condors in the wild or in managed care facilities in the U.S. and Mexico. The involvement of CRES in the rescue of this species from the brink of extinction is echoed in our organization’s logo (see above).
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I spent some time today doing my regular maintenance on the Bog Garden at the San Diego Zoo (see Mychael’s previous blog, Bog Blog: Flytraps and Ducks). This entails laying an old half ladder carefully across the bog, resting it on a milk crate so as to not crush the plants. I lay a small piece of plywood down on the ladder so I have something to sit on. This enables me to work out into the center of the bog, which is a little too far to reach from the edge. It’s low-tech, but it works. I cut out dead pitchers and flytraps, pull weeds, and cultivate the medium. The sand tends to sink down, so I like to stir it up to bring some of the sand back up to the surface. I also clear out the outlets along the center by plunging a piece of wire down each one. They tend to get a little clogged from the algae that build up in the sump.
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