San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and Safari Park Field Trip

On Tuesday November 30th I took 22 students, my mom, baby Tre and another parent chaperon one a fabulous field trip.  I had done this field trip twice before but it had been two years and it was so much more enjoyable/memorable this time, perhaps because Tre was in tow.
We started out waiting at 7:30 am in the freezing cold for a bus.  They were late so we left at 8am but not in a bus, instead the institute sent us 3 shuttle vans.  It was great service but legally a certificated staff has to be with students at all times so if anything bad happened I would have been in some big big trouble.  Anyhow upon our arrival we went to the SDZoo Institute for Conservation Research's Education Lab.  The kids took a pretest then we went on a tour of the facilities. For many of the students it was their first time in a real scientific laboratory.  After an hour tour we went back to the education lab and did an experiment on elephant feces!  Of course everything was pretty much prepared for the students.  See there are 6 female elephants at the park and the students were testing the levels of progesterone in samples of their feces taken every 2 weeks over 4 months.  They found out that 3 just gave birth in February, April and May.  Two of them are currently pregnant and the other is cycling regularly. 
Then we walked a 15 minute up hill through an off exhibit area to the San Diego Zoo's Safari Park main gate.  We got our tickets, went in and had lunch.  Then walked around the park for 2.5 hours.  We were supposed to have longer but checking in and getting lunch took longer than expected.  I had 6 exhibits in a little field guide for each student that we were supposed to visit but we only made it to 3 of them.  We spent a long time at the elephants as everybody was so fascinated with them because of the lab.  It was great seeing the students so engaged in figuring out which ones were the ones they tested.  And I enjoyed watching the little elephants suckle at their mamas.
I was going to post a bunch of pictures but just realized I don't know if all of my students have media release forms so I'm going to look into that before I post pictures of them.  For now I'll leave you with some of Tre, my mom and I.

One of my kids took this picture in the van. He put his sun glasses on Tre and said he looks like the baby from The Hangover



Here we are arriving to the lab

Tre having breakfast

Here we are walking from the lab to the park.

Here we are walking into the park.


Fatso

Elephant nursing