It's been a busy month, at Bear Manor. My Website building had to shift to our Sister Site, Bear Manor Cotons, our dog breeding business. In order to take down Ursa from the server I needed to include on the Coton information as well. This is also a good time to focus on the dogs because it turns out that Uma is pregnant! We aren't exactly surprised, Gail and Uma flew to Burlington VT to have Uma check out three males that were unrelated to our line and within our club. Dog politics are tough and prevented us from utilizing our friends dogs due to club affiliation! Reminds me of the deep divisions in our countries political affiliations.

Otherwise, I took the opportunity during a lull in active project work to travel to Orlando to visit with an old colleague and friend, Sally Coyle. She and her husband, Quentin Caron recently moved to Orlando due to Quentin taking a job with Disney supervising rock work fabrication on their current projects, which now means ' the 7 dwarf roller coaster!. This gave us access to the parks for free and a two hour walking tour of Animal Kingdom with one of the LA's for the park who had been their since it's inception. He was filled with stories of the nature of business at Disney that makes the act of platemaking sound rather like making Sausages - you might like the results, but the process is not for the faint of heart. After our tour, I realized that I like the Ursa model after all! We also took the opportunity to see Disney's Wilderness lodge, and two other local zoo's; Brevard Zoo and Central Florida Zoo. Both had their interests as we got to meet with folks that we both offered insights that could aid with upcoming projects that Sally and I are preparing to do. We are selected to handle the Site Design portion of the Children's Zoo at Franklin Park, Boston, next year with C7 and Main Street Design. I hoping that that pairing will result in rich fruit. Sally offers strength in her unique brand of the fine art of landscape architecture where I compliment her with my animal focused design work - together we are well balanced and bring lots of value to Main Street and C7.

After a great Thanksgiving break, I was invited back to North Carolina Zoo to continue work on an early 2012 project on Ocelots. Now a fully funded project, we were able to meet and discuss next steps on making this a reality. During that site visit, I had the opportunity to observe construction activities at our Polar Bear project. It is taking form, yet far behind schedule due to the complexity of all the infrastructure that was required. They are now in a position to accomplish a huge amount of work in the next 6 months. The exhibit will still be under construction for an additional year while the zoo takes over the site to provide Caging, Landscape, Rockwork and Graphics scope to the project. We are hoping that the Ocelot doesn't take 5 years it will take Polar Bear to become part of the improvements offered to the animals at NC Zoo. The ocelots have been living inside the Desert Dome for the last….25 years, and now due to our project, they will have two outdoor exhibits and two off-exhibit yards and indoor holding, that will allow them to live outdoors for the first time. The landscape transform a small area of North Carolina pine and oak forest to a high desert environment. We hope that this exhibit will supplement the great work the animal staff has been doing to breed these important endangered species.

and now - Happy Weekend! Finalizing phasing and costing exercise for Monkey Jungle. Should have a final draft this month.

I have a week to go to go LIVE with this site - wish me luck.

Nevin

Tags: travel, zoo jobs