A spot of information.

Good news! The pintail duckling was doing very well this morning, eating and limping around eagerly. After a doctor examination, we were able to put him back with his other small duckling friends. He peeped very eagerly and splashed his face in the water. I ducked behind a wall and peered around so he would think I wasn't there, and I watched him for a bit. He seemed very content, and so was I.

Another thing we did today was called elephant trunk washes. When elephants are tested for tuberculosis, it is done by squirting saline solution into their nostril. They then proceed to lift their trunk and blow the liquid back out into a bag. It is then transferred to a conical tube, which will be sent to a lab for testing. Today, as one of the keepers was holding the bag and preparing to receive the jet from one of the elephant's trunks, the bag was ruptured by the blow, and elephant trunk water went all over his face! Very unfortunate. I also found out that the reason our elephants are trained to blow into harmonicas is precisely for trunk wash practice. Because the test occurs only once a year, the elephants must keep in practice, and they let them do so in a noteworthy manner.

A few other minor checkups occured today. We have a bird to be x-rayed tomorrow and a penguin needed some medication today. Verde, the little parakeet that came the other day is doing very well. He's always in the food dish when I walk in, hopping around eagerly and chomping seeds in his little beak. He's gained some weight, and seems to be getting along well with the other keets.

I read a terribly sad statistic today. With no intervention, cheetahs will be completely extinct in just twenty years. These extremely interesting and specialized big cats are the most endangered in Africa. There were an estimated 100,000 in the wild in 1900, and by the year 2000, there were only 12,500. They have extremely low genetic diversity due to such a population bottleneck, and this leads to abnormalities among them. Often, male cheetahs are subfertile, meaning they have so low a sperm count that they cannot fertilize a female. As the world's fastest land mammal, a beautiful and inteligent creature, we must strive to stop the drastic dwindling of their numbers. Maybe from this distance, we can't personally talk to the farmers who are shooting them or parceling up the cats homeland, destroying their habitat; maybe we aren't the specific ones doing the research to help cheetahs reproduce; and maybe we will never have the pleasure to see a cheetah in the wild...but we can certainly be aware of the plight of the cheetah, and we can spread the message to those we know, and we can donate to the conservation organizations that hire those scientists and advocates in African countries. If we don't do anything, cheetah could be no more than a story of the past to those in the next generation down. My children could never have the opportunity to see these magestic lean cats, with round eyes that can see detail up to 5 km and those dark tear stains that seem to say "Please don't let me go."