One of the most curious animals you could imagine will be a resident of the new Elephant Odyssey habitat at the San Diego Zoo. It lives virtually its entire life way up in the treetops, upside down. It only travels down to ground level about once a week to use the “bathroom”! But it will not be the first of its species to live at the Zoo. It is the marvelously odd two-toed sloth, and one has been living behind the scenes at the Hunte Amphitheater show area for some time now. I am one of the trainers fortunate enough to work with this unique animal.
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As our little Zhen Zhen is getting ready to leave her mother and go into a new world on her own, Bai Yun is getting ready for a different phase. Soon Bai Yun will be in the process of weaning herself away from her cub and beginning to focus on herself. Keepers are feeding Bai Yun more and more each day to compensate what the baby takes from mom’s food stash and to encourage Bai Yun to eat more and gain weight. Right now Bai Yun is nursing and competing with her growing cub for food, so gaining weight isn’t the easiest job right now.
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San Diego Zoo staff members Bryan Endress and Maren Peterson are currently in Vietnam to help put together a conservation plan for critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. They are keeping us posted on their progress. See their previous blog, Snub-nosed Monkey Habitat.

We are back in Hanoi for a few meetings before flying back to the States tomorrow. It was a good trip. Our field work ended with a trip to the other side of the proposed Khau Ca protected area. We were told we were the first foreigners to visit both sides. It was a beautiful area and the local community was extremely friendly. I’ll try to post pictures when we return.
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A common activity with young children is to make handprints with finger paint for proud parents to display on their refrigerators. These are often kept for years to reminisce about the growth of their children. We decided that this would be a useful exercise to do with our African elephant calves at the Wild Animal Park. While we didn’t hang these prints on the refrigerator, we did use the print measurements to compare their growth with the growth of wild African elephant calves.
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San Diego Zoo staff members Bryan Endress and Maren Peterson are currently in Vietnam to help put together a conservation plan for critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. They are keeping us posted on their progress. See their previous blog, Snub-nosed Monkeys: Meetings.

Our expedition to the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey habitat was yesterday. To get to the area, we hiked from 600 to 2,000 feet (180 to 600 meters) in altitude. We saw proposed reforestation areas, including family gardens, pastures, and corn and cassava fields. We stayed overnight at a ranger station with guides that patrol the forest.
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Things continue to go well in the den for sun bear Marcella and her twin cubs (see previous blog, Sun Bears: Growing Up Great). The youngsters are now nearly 2.5 months old and have grown by literal leaps and bounds. Their eyes have long since fully opened, and the cubs are able to take in the world around them. Now that they are becoming more mobile, they are able to interact with that world as well.
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