Currently, our main goal is preparing Jewel for her first dental procedure, scheduled for early December. We are making modifications to the building and getting both girls comfortable being away from each other for increased lengths of time.

Every day is an interesting adventure! Tina and Jewel continue to work well for the keepers. Work on their feet is coming along nicely, and we have successfully taken X rays of all four feet on both of them. They have even gotten a glimpse of the other elephants. Surprisingly, they didn’t have much of a reaction.

While we offer them a variety of enrichment items, the ball still seems to be their favorite toy. We fill it with pellets, and they bounce and roll it around to get the food out.

Stay tuned for the adventures to come.

Victoria Zahn is a senior keeper at the San Diego Zoo.

Both girls are coming along well with their training, although Tina tends to catch on a bit quicker than Jewel. However, Tina tends to complain a bit more, too! She talks more than any elephant I have ever worked with, and if you ask her to do a behavior she would prefer not to, she squawks and squawks. Her personality is very entertaining, and she makes me laugh daily!

Last week, we made a mud wallow for the girls, and they had a great time throwing mud all over themselves. While they are in quarantine, they just have access to the special needs stall and yard, so we work hard to give them new and different enrichment to keep them entertained. Jewel has taken to the pellet toys and will continue to play with them even after she has gotten all the food pellets out.

Currently we are focusing on teaching them husbandry behaviors so we can continue to take great care of them. These behaviors include presenting all four feet to be scrubbed, leaning their sides in for body access, and opening their mouths for dental checks.

I am so happy to be working with these very sweet girls and look forward to coming to work every day to see what they will do next.

Victoria Zahn is a senior keeper at the San Diego Zoo.

In the morning when the keepers are busy cleaning and setting up the yards, Ingadze can be seen running back and forth along the fence line and heard trumpeting as if he is trying to get the keepers’ attention. Well, that tactic usually works! The keepers will run along the fence line mimicking Ingadze, and boy, does he seem to love all of the attention. He will flare his ears, spin around, and kick out his feet. He has also started working on his “whirly bird” or “helicopter” trunk technique. Sometimes he gets so fired up that he ends up tripping over his own feet.

Just recently, Ingadze has started eating solid food. During training sessions, when mom Umngani and big sister Khosi, are being fed alfalfa pellets, Ingadze gets right in there with them. He often times will stick his trunk in Umngani’s mouth or Khosi’s mouth to see what they are eating. His keepers have started offering him alfalfa pellets as well as various types of browse, which he eagerly takes and puts into his mouth. When the keepers are tossing out alfalfa pellets into the yard, Ingadze can be seen following the pellet trail and picking them up to eat, just like the rest of the herd.

At 256 kilograms (563 pounds!), Ingadze is growing up fast. So, make sure and stop by the next time you visit the Wild Animal Park. Chances are, spending a bit of time at the Elephant Overlook to watch Ingadze and the rest of his family will put a smile on your face!

Heather Rogers is a keeper at the Wild Animal Park.

For those of you not familiar with the special needs area within Elephant Odyssey, where Tina and Jewel are currently living, the floors inside the stalls are made of state-of-the art rubberized flooring. They also have access to a dirt yard where toys and other enrichment devices can be placed. We look forward to introducing them to the rest of the facility and elephants later this year.

Stacy Conery is a keeper at the San Diego Zoo.

Rick and Rio meet some Zoo visitors.

Of course, the job of Elephant Odyssey Ambassador has been an amazing adventure and very enjoyable, too. It has kept me very busy, as you may remember from my previous posts. But not so busy that I could not stop in at the Children’s Zoo to work a little with the animals, from the high-energy fossa named Isa to the laid-back binturong named Bandar or even the silly and vocal Amazon parrot Rio. There are so many different animals, I couldn’t possibly name them all here, if for no other reason that there’s just not enough room in this post!

Now that Elephant Odyssey is open at the Zoo, I am doing less traveling around the country to tell people about the new exhibit. However, I am giving talks and more tours of the exhibit to show people this amazing experience at the Zoo. Although giving tours and talks keeps me busy, I am also finding I have more time to spend in the Children’s Zoo!

The last few weeks I have been able to balance my time pretty well between both jobs, working as a keeper and as an ambassador. You might think both jobs are quite different, and in many ways they are; however, in some ways they are alike. For example, both jobs allow me the opportunity to share my passion for wildlife and conservation to anyone and everyone I cross paths with!

If by chance you happen to find yourself over in the Children’s Zoo, feel free to say “hello.” Of course, the same goes for when you see me over at Elephant Odyssey: if I am giving a tour, doing an interview, or just walking through, make sure you say “hello.”

Rick Schwartz is a senior keeper and the Elephant Odyssey Ambassador for the San Diego Zoo.

Ranchipur and Cha Cha

As of now, we have successfully introduced Sumithi, Devi, Cha Cha, and Cookie together, and they can be seen most days in yard one until about 10:30 a.m. or longer. Elephant intros can be tedious and do take awhile to accomplish. Cookie and Devi provide most of the activity. Devi is challenging Cookie for dominance, and Cookie, being the wise old girl that she is, isn’t taking the challenge lying down. There are lots of interactions between the two: some rough ones, some fast ones, with Cookie chasing Devi the length of the yard; and some quiet ones where they stand side by side.

Sumithi and Cha Cha have decided to be neutral and are getting along pretty well. Cha Cha really wants to be friends, but the verdict is still out with Sumithi, although she doesn’t mind that Cha Cha is standing near. Devi and Cha Cha are really fun to watch. So many little nuances: Devi standing quietly next to Cha Cha eating, dusting, touching, then Devi swats Cha Cha just for good measure. Cha Cha doesn’t mind, for it is all part of elephant behavior. Each day gets better and more fun to watch them all interact.

We have had Tembo in with the group, and it was pretty chaotic. Tembo was afraid of the others and charged and pushed them around, but did not carry it too far. We had Tembo and Cookie together by themselves today and it went okay. Tembo definitely was the aggressor, but Cookie did not give in, and after about 45 minutes, they were standing side by side.

This is just a brief overview of how the intros have been going. We try them almost every day with some combination of the girls. It will take quite awhile for everyone to get accustomed to each other, but we have all the time in the world and a top-notch facility to allow these wonderful elephants time to work things out on their timetable. For those who have visited and seen elephants separated into other exhibits, it is because Ranchipur is in musth and can be very aggressive toward the other elephants. Cha Cha is his favorite, and she keeps him company. Our goal is to have everyone together and have access to all of the exhibits and let them determine where they want to hang out and with whom. Choices…that’s what it’s all about, and soon, Tina and Jewel will be a part of those choices!

I have been given the task, along with several other keepers in our program, of introducing Tina and Jewel into our facility and our elephant family and they are responding great. Both are great girls and seem to like their new surroundings. Over the next several weeks, we will be working toward improving their health and getting them used to our methods of caring for elephants before we attempt to introduce them to the rest of our group. Stay tuned!

Ron Ringer is a senior keeper at the San Diego Zoo.

Tina opens her mouth for our vet's visual exam.

Both elephants like most of the fruits and vegetables that have been offered. We have also given them three varieties of hay and several types of browse material. Both elephants love raisins, which the keepers have used for some training procedures. Apples, carrots, sweet potatoes, sweet corn, squash, cucumbers, celery, and romaine lettuce are just some of the varieties the new girls can enjoy.

The quality of the produce we give all of our animals at the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park is the same quality that you would buy for your own table at home. Each elephant receives approximately 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of food daily!

Rod Owlett is an animal care supervisor at the San Diego Zoo.

Umngani walks with her new calf, Ingadze, who is followed by Kamile. Lungile is in the background eating hay.

Like any normal family, female elephants in family groups have disputes and are known to display aggression toward one another. This aggression follows particular rules based on a dominance hierarchy in which each female has a rank ranging from dominant to subordinate. For wild elephants, ranks are based on age or size in that the matriarch, often the oldest and largest female, is also the most dominant. Then the next oldest or largest female in the herd follows as second in command and so on until you reach the youngest and smallest female as the lowest rank and most subordinate. You may find this somewhat similar to an older sibling picking on the middle child while the middle picks on the youngest.

Groups of elephants living in zoos differ from families of wild elephants in that oftentimes the females in zoo groups are not related. Despite this, groups of zoo elephants also display dominance hierarchies. We studied hierarchy of our six female elephants in the Wild Animal Park herd by recording aggressive interactions. These interactions included pushing one another around or stealing a resource from one another (e.g. hay pile, enrichment item, mud wallow, swimming pool). We were particularly interested in seeing how our females ranked themselves in the hierarchy because they are similar in age and size.

How did our females determine their ranks? We found they followed a similar pattern to wild elephants in that our bigger females (Swazi, Umoya, and Ndula) ranked higher in the hierarchy and were dominant, while our smaller females (Umngani, Litsemba, and Lungile) ranked lower and were subordinate. This tells us that, although our females are not a closely related family group like wild elephant herds, they still interact with one another in a natural way that any other elephant family would.

On a personal note, I would like to thank all of the blog enthusiasts for accepting me as a member of the Wild Animal Park elephant research family by reading and commenting on my posts. The one-year research fellowship that I began last August is coming to a close, and so is my time with the elephants. The rest of the staff will keep you up to date for now, but it has been a pleasure sharing stories about the elephants with all of you!

Emily Rothwell is a Heller Fellow Research Associate with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. Read her previous post, Sleeping Giants.

Watch the Park’s elephants daily on Elephant Cam.

Update: The Park’s Meet the Elephants page has been updated!

A bachelor herd at the waterhole in Botswana.

Sometimes, bachelor boy groups get a bad name. But male elephants form bachelor herds that are quite close knit.

Young males generally leave their birth herd and somehow find other males to wander around with. We came across a herd of six boys at a waterhole in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. They were not only drinking the water, but also splashing mud all over themselves. Other males slowly came through the bush and joined them.

We were fascinated by how they interacted with each other. Having just spent some time watching large groups of elephant communities at the river, these boys were more social than you might think. They’d use their trunks in an elephant version of “high five.” As one male came close to another, they’d twine their trunks together. They also used their trunks to stick in the mouths of their friends, to stroke the neck and back of their friends, and to generally touch each other. Periodically, they’d also give rumble calls to each other. The classic elephant herd is composed of female relatives and their offspring, while the bachelor bands seem to be unrelated males. Yet “the boys” appear to form close bonds.

Their bonding was even more obvious when it came time to put GPS collars on them. We use the satellite collars to pick up elephant movements, and one of the goals of this trip was to outfit some males in a new area to try to figure out why they were there and where they wandered. The area is fairly desolate, water is sparse, and the elephants have only recently come to the region after decades of absence.

View from the helicopter: The darted male slows down.

Male with GPS collar.

Nobody really knows how bulls form friendships with each other or how they decide where to go when they leave the herd. We also have no idea why they were in an area that hardly had any cows and calves. What were the males doing by themselves in this desolate region of Botswana, and how do they figure out how to navigate their environment? We hope to find out.

Fred Bercovitch is the director of Behavioral Biology at the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research.

Help us save elephants one step at a time: Project Elephant Footprint.

Tina puts a trunk up to check in with travel partner Jewel in their new home at the San Diego Zoo.

APHIS, the agency that enforces the federal Animal Welfare Act, chose the San Diego Zoo as the receiving facility for these elephants because the Zoo can provide the elephants with the care that best matches their particular needs. The newly created Prebys Elephant Care Center is a state-of-the-art facility designed with the care of older pachyderms in mind. The elephant move occurred under the auspices of APHIS and was observed by San Diego Humane Society officials.

Once the truck arrived at the Zoo, it was opened, and the elephants were invited by animal care staff to come into their new home. It took a couple of hours for them to decide to take advantage of the offer, but finally both girls were in the Elephant Care Center together, munching on bananas, chirping, and checking each other with their trunks.

Jewel and Tina are not expected to be available for public viewing for the next few weeks as they acclimate and receive thorough health examinations. Zoo officials hope that the two will integrate well into the existing herd of seven elephants current housed in the new exhibit.

Christina Simmons is the public relations manager for the San Diego Zoo.

Note: We hope to have more information on Tina and Jewel by the end of this week. We now have video of their first veterinary exam at the Zoo.