I tweeted from the nursery this morning that Don had just whacked me in the head with his “tale.”  I caught the mistake right away and sent a follow-up tweet apologizing for the typo, but I couldn’t follow every retweet with an explanation.  And the one time that I would have preferred no RTs, there were many! For the record, I know the difference between a tale and a tail, and Don’s got a pretty powerful tail!

Don won the lap war this morning.  He held his ground in the pouch on my lap and thwarted Tom’s frequent head-first attempts to dethrone (unpouch) him.  They put on a pretty good show for the guests looking in through the nursery window.  In addition to watching the live action, one guest scanned the QR code that’s on the wallabies’ ID sign. The QR code links to a video about the baby wallabies, and I was happy to see him watch it and then show it to his daughter (making the QR codes & tracking their use is part of my real job!)

I look forward to having more wallaby tales to tell next week.

Dawn with Don & Tom - 1st outing

The boys’ quarantine period is over, so we’ll get to start taking them out of the nursery after Dawn & Ronda, nursery keepers, train us on proper pouch techniques. Bending over while carrying them, for instance, is a no-no because that would be a mom’s signal to get out!

Today Don & Tom both cuddled on me in separate pouches. They fought over the one pouch on my lap last week, hissing and scratching each other, so I grabbed two this time and everybody was happy. They’re getting bigger and more independent.

The nursery is pretty full right now with three baby miniature pigs, three baby bat-eared foxes and Lucy the bearcat, so the nursery keepers can’t spend as much time with the wallabies as they did before the new babies arrived. The time that the socializing team spends with them is more important than ever.

Don shows his dance moves

The Graphics team and I visited the Kingdom Productions Inc. studio today to check on the progress of a tiger relief sculpture they’re working on for the Cat Canyon exhibit. Zoo Curator Mike Dulaney came along to provide his expert opinion on the tiger’s shape and color.

Here is a mock-up of the tiger’s face in detail. I love the effect of the bouncy ball eyes, but I imagine they’ll be replaced in the final piece.

Detailed prototype of tiger face

This is the foundation for the life-size tiger relief made of concrete and clay. I didn’t get a real crisp image, but you get the idea.

Full body

Here is a close-up of just the tiger face. I wish I were so talented!

Close-up of tiger head

Now that the full body tiger has Mike’s stamp of approval, the next step will be to make a rubber mold. The final piece will be made from that with fiber reinforced concrete. Then, they’ll add on some nylon whiskers and paint the body. After checking out the painting sample below, Mike suggested that the colors need to be a bit darker and more muted.

Painted tiger head

We were very impressed with what we saw. It will be exciting to see the final piece come together over the next couple of months!