In January of 2007 I started preparing for a trip to the US to attend the North American Felid TAXON Advisory Group (TAG) Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. I need to say up front that this could not have happened without the very generous help I got from JoGayle Howard at the National Zoo, Bill Swanson at the Cincinnatti Zoo, and Ron Tilson at the Minnesota Zoo. I am really grateful to these friends and their instituions for making this happen.

So, there I was in Thailand with a date on my calendar to present some results from the project but we still hadn't gotten even a photo of the cats! Fortunately, just a couple of weeks later, we set up our cameras on a muddy shoal in Thale Noi Lake and BINGO!!!...finally got a picture of the elusive critter (see previous post).

About six weeks later, at the beginning of April, I was in the US and had the privalege of being in Nashville, Tennessee for the TAG meeting. One of the presentations that I gave there can be found here. The meeting was great and I didn't realize that that the cat conservation crowd were such partiers!

Back in January, I had applied to study at the University of Minnesota and shortly after getting back to the states I found out that I had been accepted into UMN's graduate program in Conservation Biology. this caused a major change of plans and I decided to just stay in the US (Pete Cutter, my husband is finishing up a PhD. at UMN) until school started. We had a great couple of visits to the Minnesota Zoo over the summer and after starting classes in the fall, I have been concentrating mainly on school and making sure that the stage is set for a strong field season this year. Pete and I have both been working on the communication side of the project and we are hoping that this site serves as a versatle means for communicating with the public and with project collaborators.