Hi everyone,

It's always a bit of a grind to back into the swing of things at work after being away for a long time. Have been back a few weeks now from the Warru field trip and 3 weeks in North America and the jetlag is just about gone!

The Warru (Black-flanked Rock Wallaby) trip up in the APY Lands near Ernabella went great. It is beautiful country up there and the opportunity to work alongside the local Anangu people was a wonderful experience. This trip was the latest in a series of expeditions to assess the populations in northern South Australia, which has suffered significant declines in recent times, primarily due to fox predation.

My attentions are again focussed outside the zoo. Today is my last day at work before I head up to the APY Lands with Ian and two keepers, Gayle and Heidi, to join a team from DEH and Adelaide Uni to look at black-flanked rock wallabies (or 'warru'), a threatened species in South Australia.

In addition to conducting health checks, we are taking lots of samples for ongoing research projects, and appropriately sized pouch young will be taken from the pouch, flown back down and fostered onto rock wallabies at Adelaide and Monarto Zoos. The mother will give birth to another joey soon afterwards, allowing many more joeys to be raised each year than would otherwise be the case. This technique has also been used for the Victorian brush-tailed rock wallaby, as seen recently on the channel 7 program 'The Zoo'. So, I am busy getting all our equipment ready to go, so we can hit the road early on Sunday morning.