(laughter)
(knocking)
WOMAN: Wakey-wakey.
WOMAN 2: Oh look there's a nose. WOMAN: I see a nose.
Hi. There's some tasty snacks here.
WOMAN 2: There we go. WOMAN: Oh, there she is.
Hey sweet girl.
She loves avocado and we actually mix it with banana.
She's excited.
WOMAN 2: Yeah. WOMAN: Favorite, favorite.
Enjoy that snack.
(laughter).
That’s perfect.
(theme music playing).
(trumpeting)
NARRATOR: Every day is magical at
Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park.
But for Mac, the African bull elephant,
today is once in a lifetime.
HALEY: So today is Mac’s 40th birthday.
So we are getting together a little birthday party for him,
we have a birthday cake made by our animal nutrition center.
JENN: I like his, his favorite, his icing, yeah.
STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, sweet potato icing.
MAN: Good boy Mac, come on.
NARRATOR: No time to waste,
Mac loves a party.
STEPHANIE: The theme is Saint Patrick’s Day,
what are you planning on using the carrots for Jenn?
JENN: I'm gonna make little gold inside of his pot of gold.
So use the watermelon for that.
STEPHANIE: Oh very cool, okay. JENN: Yeah.
MAN: Good boy.
NARRATOR: Another favorite, frozen fruit treats.
JENNY: So I'm going to be making these ice treats here
and trying to coordinate with the rainbow that
we're doing with the elephant team.
We're going to do sweet potatoes
and carrots in one layer
for orange, apples in the other for red,
blueberries for blue, I'll be doing celery for green,
and then one of Mac’s favorites is bananas.
MAN: All right Mac, go on.
Good boy.
JENN: It's gonna be delicious. STEPHANIE: Oh yeah.
JENNY: Nailed it.
STEPHANIE: Are yours ready? JENNY: Ready.
JENN: Yeah, ready. STEPHANIE: Let’s go.
NARRATOR: Saint Patrick himself would approve of this spread.
Mostly.
HALEY: Come on Mac.
It's your big birthday celebration.
Oh, there he is. Oh, I'm so excited.
Here he comes.
(trumpeting)
STEPHANIE: Mac has a really big personality,
he's just really fun to work with.
As he's getting older you can see that he is aging.
HALEY: He's a distinguished older gentleman.
STEPHANIE: He definitely still has what it takes to keep up
with our younger elephants.
Keep going.
Look at all this other stuff.
There's so much more.
Oh...
HALEY: Oh-uh, yeah, there we go.
Oh happy birthday.
STEPHANIE: Oh. Look there's watermelon.
JENN: You deserve that pot of gold.
STEPHANIE: He says, “Let me just knock these carrots off,
I don’t need those.”
HALEY: We don’t need the healthy bit.
JENN: Not necessary.
STEPHANIE: Oh good boy.
Mm.
ALL: Watermelon.
STEPHANIE: The watermelon.
I like when he eats it and he closes his eyes.
JENN: Yes. STEPHANIE: 'Cause it's so good.
HALEY: What a great birthday celebration.
STEPHANIE: Ooh, that’s a big piece.
Oh. He ate it.
(bellows)
Uh-oh, brain freeze.
(laughter).
(overlapping chatter).
NARRATOR: Mac has two young daughters at the park.
(trumpets)
11 year old Luna, and five year old Stella.
But the team hopes that changes soon.
LIZ: We are seeing more testosterone with him,
we've been tracking his levels through his blood and,
and in his behavior as well so we're seeing it on the charts,
but we're also seeing it behaviorally.
(trumpets)
NARRATOR: This change in behavior is called, “Must.”
(bellows)
LIZ: Some of the signs of must for elephants
is urine dribbling.
(bellows)
They start secreting from their heads,
those glands right near their ears.
He's got a little bit of an attitude,
he's a little crabby.
NARRATOR: In the wild male elephants in must square off
with other males to attract females.
(trumpeting)
(bellows)
LIZ: From someone outside the barn they go,
“Oh that seems terrible,” for us we're actually really excited
that he's got a little bit of an attitude now.
NARRATOR: At the right time to the right female,
a musty Mac is quite the catch.
KENT: All right Nadirah, down.
Good girl. Good.
NARRATOR: And the team hopes 16 year old Nadirah
could be the one.
KENT: Give me your foot.
That’s a good kid.
Good foot.
LIZ: Yeah. KENT: Ready?
LIZ: Ready. KENT: All right, Nadirah, ear.
Back up. Steady.
Nadirah, ear. Good, steady.
LIZ: Today we're gonna do a blood draw from Nadirah’s ear,
we're gonna use that blood draw to see if she's cycling.
But it's not painful, it's just a little butterfly needle
and the ear is the thinnest part of their skin,
so most of the time they don’t even feel it,
they don’t even realize it's happening.
And then right afterwards they get a big treat.
All done.
NARRATOR: Using the blood draw, Liz performs a quick test to
determine if Nadirah’s ovulating.
LIZ: It only takes a few drops.
And then 15 minutes.
Very, very faint but I see it.
If you see anything it means that it's positive.
That means that she might get pregnant.
ADRIANA: Steady. Good girl.
Nadirah’s on her way.
LIZ: She's gonna spend some time with Mac this morning.
NARRATOR: Science says it's the perfect time for a meeting
with Mac but now it's up to the two of them
to make the magic happen.
LIZ: It's exciting. Hopefully it happens.
KENT: Good girl Nadirah, Mac’s waiting.
Don’t eat GoPros.
NARRATOR: At Gorilla Falls, while Gino the silverback
grapples with family life...
(growls)
Just across the hill
Animal Kingdom’s bachelor group takes it easy.
COURTNEY: There are four gorillas in our bachelor troupe.
This is Kejana right here.
He's the biggest male in our troupe and he's our leader.
Gus is all the way back that direction.
This is Zawadi, Spike’s half-brother.
Oh here comes Spike, he’s the one that’s coming up
the hill over here.
Spike and Zawadi they're very close.
They spend a lot of time very close together.
NARRATOR: Male gorillas who don’t have families form
all-male squads like this one.
COURTNEY: These bachelor troupes are necessary and it
actually happens in the natural environment as well.
These guys have lived here most of their lives,
they’ve been here since the park opened.
Their relationships are just as important
as the family relationships.
NARRATOR: Despite living separately,
the two groups are on friendly terms.
COURTNEY: They can see over
in to the family habitat really well.
Spike is actually one of our gorillas that spends
a lot of time orienting to the family.
He’ll actually sit and make googly eyes at Lilly.
NARRATOR: But sometimes Spike struggles
to make it to his lookout.
COURTNEY: A couple of years ago, Spike came down with an illness.
He basically lost the ability to move his back legs.
He was essentially paralyzed.
NARRATOR: Spike was infected with rat lungworm,
a parasite transferred through snails.
DR. NATALIE: Sometimes you have no symptoms at all,
but sometimes it affects the brain and the spinal cord,
and you can be paralyzed.
Just like what happened with Spike.
COURTNEY: Because of our amazing veterinary staff here,
we were able to treat him.
NARRATOR: With the help of physical therapy specialists
the team designed a program to help him regain his mobility.
COURTNEY: Spike in the middle.
Come this way.
To see him go from being an animal in such
a compromised condition to recovering from his illness,
being able to walk again, reuniting with the group,
it's been such a wonderful experience.
He's an amazing animal but he still has lasting effects from
what happened back then, so,
he has some good days and some bad days.
PILAR: All right, we're ready for Spike and Zawadi.
DR. NATALIE: So every month or so I go down
and visit with Spike, because we wanna make sure that
his quality of life is really great.
KEEPER: Spike and Zawadi are in the yard.
DR. NATALIE: There's Spike.
NARRATOR: Worryingly, keepers notice a decline
in Spike’s mobility.
PILAR: See how he's dragging that foot?
DR. NATALIE: Do you see how he's bearing weight on his right leg
and that left leg is leaning in?
That’s worse than it was. That looks not very good.
PILAR: The more he's using it he tires out.
And then that’s when it starts to drag more.
DR. NATALIE: He's a bit animal...
PILAR: Mm-hmm.
DR. NATALIE: It's a lot when your,
both of your legs aren't feeling great.
PILAR: Right.
DR. NATALIE: I am really worried,
his knees aren't working the way
they should and I'm very concerned
what's happening there.
NARRATOR: Spike needs to be sedated for an examination
as soon as possible.
DR. NATALIE: In the immediate sense we’ll start him on some
anti-inflammatories to get him better...
WOMAN: Mm-hmm. DR. NATALIE: More immediate.
WOMAN: Yeah.
DR. NATALIE: And then I'll go from there.
NARRATOR: About 100 miles southeast of the park sits
Disney’s Vero Beach Resort.
And as night falls, some extra special guests are due.
RACHEL: We always have to remember to look behind us too
‘cause they could be coming up just behind us as we walk.
NARRATOR: Conservation Programs Manager, Rachel,
waits on the beach to welcome them.
RACHEL: So we're out here on the beach this evening to look for
loggerhead sea turtles so that we can study them and
perform health assessments on them.
We could see three different species this evening,
the loggerhead which we're looking for,
also green sea turtles and leatherback sea turtles.
We estimate that only one in 1,000 sea turtles
survive to adulthood.
Which is why every single egg
and every single hatchling matters a lot.
NARRATOR: Every year, mama turtles make thousands of nests
along this stretch of coastline.
The team uses night vision to avoid disturbing them.
RACHEL: We're hoping to see either turtles emerging
directly from the surf,
or a turtle that’s already began her nesting process.
So I see something moving up in the bushes.
WOMAN: Down there? RACHEL: Yeah.
I think she's like up in the dune.
Yeah she's up there.
Awesome. It's a green turtle.
They're notorious for going up in the vegetation and
making a huge mess.
There she comes.
We're staying back at the water’s edge and
watching her from a distance because we are only out here
to study loggerhead sea turtles tonight.
They’ll lay a new nest every two weeks or so
for the entirety of the nesting season.
This sometimes results in six, seven,
800 eggs per nesting female.
It's amazing to see.
NARRATOR: As dawn breaks, Rachel heads out to see if
any other turtle mamas have laid.
RACHEL: It's reading the sand for clues.
We call it turtle CSI.
There's one.
‘Cause we found a new loggerhead nest,
we can see these lovely tracks coming up from the ocean,
ascending up the beach and then
we see this lovely big fluffy pile of sand,
and that’s our indicator that this is a nest.
NARRATOR: Every two to three years female loggerheads journey
thousands of miles to nest in the same area they hatched from.
RACHEL: When the nesting female came up here last night
she dug out an egg chamber that looks like
sort of an upside down light bulb
and she did that entirely with her rear flippers.
After that point she went in to the camouflaging phase,
she meticulously covered the nest back up to make sure that
she protected this nest from predator.
NARRATOR: Eggs laid, the mama loggerhead leaves and
doesn’t come back.
Rachel steps in to monitor and protect the nest.
RACHEL: I'm digging to verify the clutch location.
We only dig until we find the top egg in the clutch.
I can feel the top of the clutch here.
We don’t pull any eggs out, we don’t disturb the nest at all.
DANIELLE: Did you find it already?
RACHEL: I found it yup, I got it on the first hole.
DANIELLE: Woo-hoo!
RACHEL: So I'm just putting some protective flagging tape around
this nest to make sure that everyone
knows where not to step.
Danielle’s packing in the sand really tight to
make sure to leave it exactly as we found it.
These nests are temperature dependent in terms of
what sex the hatchlings becomes.
The warmer eggs will turn in to female hatchlings and
cooler eggs will become males.
We at Disney like to affectionately call that,
"Hot Chicks, Cool Dudes,"
to remember it.
She tries to find that sweet spot in the sand where
the upper half of the nest is slightly warmer than
the lower half of the nest.
NARRATOR: In around two months the little hatchlings will make
their way to the sea.
RACHEL: Loggerheads are rapidly declining elsewhere
throughout their range.
So we're really happy to be able to see them
thriving here in Florida.
It's just due to all the conservation efforts of so
many decades, so many people.
NARRATOR: Over at the elephant barn,
at Disney’s Animal Kingdom,
the team hopes romance is in the air.
LIZ: So Mac’s already stationed in the bull yard,
he's been hanging out there for the last hour or so.
Look, here comes Nadirah.
And we’ll see what happens.
So this is their initial greeting.
(bellows)
This is great behavior, like Nadirah’s comfortable enough and
she's confident enough to go up to him,
she wants him to interact with her which is great.
And then her turning.
So her walking away might seem like she's not interested,
but that’s just kind of how this process goes.
And if he were to stop at any moment you'll probably see
her stop as well so that he can catch up.
And now she's coming back just to kinda see what he's doing.
There is a little bit of flirting I guess you could say.
Like sparring between the two of them.
It's a lot of sniffing.
NARRATOR: But will Mac make his move?
LIZ: Oh, here he comes.
Maybe?
She's moving.
She’ll stop, hopefully sometime soon.
NARRATOR: Elephant romance can't be rushed.
LIZ: So this is probably gonna go off and on all day,
this is always like the frustrating part.
(trumpets)
LIZ: So they're both being very polite,
they're both being very gentle.
NARRATOR: Mac moves at his own pace.
LIZ: We’ll keep them together for most of the day still and
we’ll probably give them more opportunities
throughout the week.
NARRATOR: But Nadirah wants to move things along.
LIZ: That’s definitely something that we are looking for,
we want her to stand for him.
(gasps)
There he goes.
(trumpets)
NARRATOR: A perfect elephant meeting.
LIZ: Yeah I'm excited, hopefully get a little baby Nadirah.
NARRATOR: Over at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort
and Camp Ground,
the stables at Tri-Circle-D-Ranch are home to
a fairy tale star in training.
STEPHANIE: You excited for your big day?
NARRATOR: Say hello to Lilly.
STEPHANIE: Lilly’s training to be a Cinderella pony for
our Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings.
NARRATOR: People from around the world choose
Walt Disney World Resort to host their weddings,
and at some, Cinderella’s ponies transport couples
to their happily ever afters.
STEPHANIE: It does take a lot of work
to become a Cinderella pony.
To be a part of someone’s special day is truly magical.
Are you ready?
She says, "Just eating breakfast."
She's in no hurry.
She says, "You guys move on my time."
(laughs).
NARRATOR: Today, little Lilly needs a big breakfast.
STEPHANIE: It's a special day for Lilly because
she's heading to Disney’s Wedding Pavilion
to practice for a fairy tale wedding.
Are you ready for your big day?
NARRATOR: If the training goes well,
Lilly will be in line for her first real wedding.
STEPHANIE: But what we're gonna do is make sure
all of the spots are off.
That’s very important that she's looking her best.
Get your hair outta your eyes.
Hi Elsa, good morning.
So this is Elsa, this is Lilly’s friend that
is gonna support her.
(bellows)
Elsa says, "Hello."
Yeah, that’s a good girl.
This is actually the first time that Lilly’s gonna put
on the wedding harness.
The key is to make sure that everything we do,
she's like, “Oh scratch me,” um,
is comfortable for her.
And when she goes out there we want her to feel her best.
All right, Lilly let’s go.
NARRATOR: Beyond the Ranch,
Walt Disney World Resort brims with activity.
STEPHANIE: The first step for Lilly’s training is for Lilly to
be confident out there because she's gonna encounter a lot,
they see lots of children, strollers, balloons,
we wanna make sure that she enjoys all of it.
(cheering)
NARRATOR: In today’s session, Lilly will see one of the park’s
most famous features for the first time.
The monorail.
STEPHANIE: It makes a lot of noise and it's higher than them
so we wanna make sure that they're not afraid of anything.
We don’t want her to be scared, we want her to come over here
and be really relaxed doing her job.
(rumbling)
Are you ready to go?
Elsa, are you ready to show her the ropes?
WOMAN: There it is.
STEPHANIE: Now pretty girl, all right, step.
(rumbling)
Step. Good girl.
WOMAN: Oh.
STEPHANIE: Oh, that’s such a good girl!
(laughter)
WOMAN: Good job!
STEPHANIE: So she's licking her lips, um,
that’s showing she's relaxed,
she’s not tense anywhere, that’s exactly what we're looking for.
NARRATOR: Training session one is a win.
Time to rest before the next challenge.
WOMAN: Are you ready? STEPHANIE: All right, off we go.
WOMAN: All right.
NARRATOR: Over at the veterinary treatment room
the team welcomes a special guest.
Bachelor gorilla Spike’s decreased mobility has
Doctor Natalie worried about his quality of life.
DR. NATALIE: Today we're gonna do a CT scan of both his knees.
WOMAN: One, two, three.
DR. NATALIE: ‘Cause we have our veterinary technicians,
we've got three veterinarians,
we've got all of the husbandry staff so
there's gonna be a lot of folks here today.
DR. NATI: He weighs 175 kilograms,
thankfully we have our hydraulic table.
WOMAN: (inaudible). DR. NATI: Yes.
I'm liking what I'm seeing on the ECG.
Okay.
WOMAN: Good boy. DR. NATI: Awesome.
(overlapping chatter)
WOMAN: Stop. Stop.
NARRATOR: Keeper, Courtney, has worked closely with Spike since
his parasite infection.
COURTNEY: He's one of my favorite gorillas.
We've seen him have some pretty dramatic ups and downs.
We don’t always know what's gonna happen so it's always
a little bit scary each time he has one of those downward slumps, we,
we don’t know if he's gonna come out of it as
well as he did the last time.
WOMAN: He's staying nice and cozy.
WOMAN: ECG hooked up,
and he's got a nice steady rhythm there.
NARRATOR: The CT scan uses a series of x-rays to create
a 3D map of Spike’s skeleton.
DR. NATALIE: Looking through these images that we took of
Spike’s knee I'm not seeing anything obvious.
I can make some things out but nothing that would be causing
the degree of discomfort that he gets.
WOMAN: A big man.
DR. NATALIE: Have to admit, I'm a little disappointed.
NARRATOR: The team needs to know how compromised
Spike’s mobility is.
DR. NATALIE: We've got our occupational therapist here and
she's gonna be able to actually touch his knee which
she's not been able to do for a very long time.
SUSAN: So right now we're really just looking a lot of
his passive range of motion, seeing how everything moves,
we're gonna look a lot at symmetry to see if one side is
doing the same thing as the other side.
NARRATOR: The therapists find something deeply troubling.
MARZENA: Look at the muscle tone here and
then nothing, right there.
The musculature on his right side
is very, very thick and very, very strong,
when you compare that to what we see on his left side you feel
just soft tissue that really isn't able to be used the way
that he is intended to use them.
NARRATOR: Spike’s condition is deteriorating.
DR. NATALIE: This concerns me a lot.
COURTNEY: It's hard to see.
We wanna make sure that he's not in any pain.
‘Cause he moves okay.
But we just wanna make sure that he's not hurting.
STEPHANIE: Get you all harnessed up.
NARRATOR: Back over at the Ranch,
three year old Lilly has a much bigger challenge ahead.
STEPHANIE: All right Lilly, you can do this.
She's gonna be pulling the wagon with three other ponies here at
Fort Wilderness Camp Ground.
This is the next big step for Lilly to be a Cinderella pony.
Nice and slow Bun.
DEANNA: Good girl, step. STEPHANIE: Good boy, easy. Slow.
NARRATOR: Lilly’s pulling a training wagon today.
Cinderella’s out and about in her coach.
STEPHANIE: Oh, I'm glad I noticed that.
DEANNA: So we are hooking up Sherlock and Elsa to start with
and then we’ll hook up Wilbur and Lilly together.
Take you over to Elsa here.
There you go Lilly.
So being in the lead helps Lilly be able to move around.
She actually is very confident by herself.
NARRATOR: But walking as a team is a whole nother ball game.
DEANNA: She said she's ready to go.
Yeah.
STEPHANIE: Ready? Team step. DEANNA: Lilly, step.
STEPHANIE: Good girl Lilly. DEANNA: Good girl. Step.
Good girl.
Good girl. Good girl.
Good girl!
STEPHANIE: We're gonna go to the right, let her out.
DEANNA: Okay. STEPHANIE: There you go.
DEANNA: Kind of an easy way to read the horses’ body language here,
one of the first things you can look at is their ears,
with Lilly you can see her ears are kind of doing different
things every few seconds.
She's just trying to figure out what's happening,
and where she needs to be, where the other ponies are.
STEPHANIE: She's getting her tongue over Deanna.
DEANNA: Okay. STEPHANIE: A little bit of it.
DEANNA: Easy. STEPHANIE: Easy.
DEANNA: Oh, whoa. STEPHANIE: Whoa.
All right, let’s stop for just a second Deanna, let me fix her.
DEANNA: Okay. STEPHANIE: Whoa. Whoa.
Good girl.
DEANNA: Good girl.
I want her to stay straight, and not walk sideways or
be looking around too much.
NARRATOR: After an adjustment to her harness,
Lilly is ready to try again.
DEANNA: Team step. STEPHANIE: Easy.
Easy. Good girl.
DEANNA: Good girl. STEPHANIE: Good girl.
DEANNA: There we go Lily.
NARRATOR: The only way to pass this challenge,
is together.
DEANNA: So I need to make sure I have all four of the ponies even
with each other, so I'm pulling on my left line here,
on Wilbur and Lilly, to get them to turn.
There we go Lilly. Good girl Lilly.
STEPHANIE: Good girl. DEANNA: Good girl.
STEPHANIE: Good girl. Easy.
DEANNA: Lilly is doing amazing,
she is going through the turn beautifully,
she is taking charge and really showing
that she's going to be an amazing lead pony.
NARRATOR: And Lilly’s first wedding is already booked.
STEPHANIE: I can't wait to see her first wedding,
she was born to be a Cinderella pony.
DEANNA: Good girl Lilly.
STEPHANIE: Good girl, that was so good!
DEANNA: She says, “I kinda like this stuff.”
STEPHANIE: Next to the wedding, huh?
CAITLIN: Oh this is gonna be exciting.
NARRATOR: 100 miles away at Vero Beach
conservation representative Caitlin checks on
loggerhead turtle nests that have just hatched.
CAITLIN: Three mornings ago we noticed in this particular nest
there was this little divot of sand here and dozens and dozens
of little teeny tiny turtle tracks coming down out of the sand.
We give them three days to make it out on their own,
let nature take its course, and then after that time that’s
when we're gonna dig in and do the science work.
We're excited to see what we find and my hope it's to find
a lot of empty egg shells.
But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit excited
every time I find a hatchling who needed a little help in the nest.
I'm gonna dig down through.
See what we find here.
First handful.
Oh, check it out, we got a whole nice egg right there.
That’s awesome.
This is probably an unfertilized egg,
and that happens, turtles plan for this.
Lay as many as you can and hopefully the majority of
those eggs are gonna hatch out and make it to the sea.
I'm loving the color and texture of all the empty shells
we're putting out.
It's nice, healthy white papery shells are a great sign
that these eggs had a really easy time on the beach and
developed really well.
NARRATOR: To find out how successful the nest is,
Caitlin counts up the contents.
CAITLIN: We have 79 empty egg shells,
that means 79 sea turtles hatched out of this nest here,
which is a really, really great number,
only five that didn’t, uh, make it or develop,
and that is one heck of a success rate, that’s really,
really great for this nest and for sea turtles in general.
NARRATOR: Caitlin has several nests to check.
CAITLIN: You can see just how many came out,
these tracks all lead straight to the water
which is a great sign.
Oh, something’s moving.
CAITLIN: No way! Hi buddy!
Check it out! Amazing.
This is a loggerhead hatchling and he is ready to go.
Looks like he was just sitting at the top of the nest
but we’ll give him a little bit of a helping hand right now.
We’ll let him go, I don’t wanna delay him.
NARRATOR: This little one has a huge swim ahead that will
take more than 24 hours.
CAITLIN: Literally like a marathon,
off the coast of Florida there's a big patch of algae
that they can hide in, there's food in there for them.
I know it looks rough right now, but it's a good way to get
his strength up before he has to swim.
It's the first time he's used those muscles.
So hard to watch as he like just keeps getting beat back.
It’ll take a couple tries but he’ll get out.
Oh, it always feels so incredible to be able to give
a hatchling a helping hand and if it's a female
we're gonna see her come back in 30 years.
See you later little guy.
Good luck.
DEANNA: Good morning Lilly.
NARRATOR: Dawn at the stables.
DEANNA: All right Lilly, we have a surprise for you.
It's your big day.
Ready for your surprise Lilly?
STEPHANIE: Lilly, look, it's your mom!
She's gonna go with you today.
DEANNA: Make sure that...
NARRATOR: Finally, it's a wedding day.
And the ponies need pampering.
DEANNA: Now we put a bunch of soap all over them and we scrub them down,
make sure to scrub their manes and their tails,
their faces, and even their hooves.
Lilly, you're all clean, it's time for you to get dressed
and ready to go.
All right.
STEPHANIE: Come on mom.
NARRATOR: The team gets ready backstage at
Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa,
and today only Cinderella’s coach will do.
STEPHANIE: Lilly you're gonna be great today,
your mom’s behind you and Deanna’s driving,
you're gonna be awesome today.
DEANNA: Team step. STEPHANIE: Good girl Lilly.
Good girl Lilly. Good girl.
NARRATOR: Disney’s wedding pavilion is half a mile away.
(bellows)
STEPHANIE: Good job Lilly.
Slow down Deanna, you got the monorail coming in the bay right now.
DEANNA: Okay.
(rumbling)
STEPHANIE: That's a good girl. DEANNA: Good girl!
STEPHANIE: Good girl. DEANNA: Good.
STEPHANIE: Good job Lilly.
This is exactly what we've been preparing for with Lilly.
She looks like she's been doing this her whole life.
DEANNA: Walk up. STEPHANIE: Good girl.
DEANNA: Stop. Stop.
Team step. Good girl, stop, easy.
And whoa.
All right, now we're just gonna wait for our bride to come out.
STEPHANIE: She did so good, she's so relaxed, she says,
“Everyone gets scratches.”
(laughs)
NARRATOR: Scratches are nice any time.
STEPHANIE: Good girl.
NARRATOR: But Lilly’s waited her whole life for this moment.
KATHLEEN: Oh my, God.
It's incredible!
I feel like Cinderella.
So magical.
DEANNA: Your Prince Charming awaits.
STEPHANIE: Good girl Lilly.
Good girl Lilly.
I am beyond excited.
We knew her destiny from the beginning and to see it all
come together has just been truly magical.
NARRATOR: Lilly finally gets her wish.
As for the fairy tale bride...
KATHLEEN: I've finally found my Prince Charming.
TATE: Guess what I found?
KATHLEEN: Hmm?
(laughs).
(bellows)
HALEY: Good girl, Nadirah!
Oh good girl.
ERIN: So we are having a very busy day today,
we have a reproductive specialist here.
NARRATOR: It's been three months since Mac and
Nadirah’s first mating meet-up.
ERIN: So we do have blood results that indicate she is pregnant.
I'm really happy, it's something that the team we've been working
towards it for a very long time.
And what we are hoping today is being able to conduct
the ultrasound and to have more confirmation.
NARRATOR: Ultrasounds can only image a foot beyond the probe.
DR. WENDY: So going through their thick skin is
quite difficult so what we do is we go rectally.
All right, I'm going in with the probe.
WOMAN: Okay.
DR. WENDY: In. Steady.
Nadirah. Steady.
DR. RYAN: She's all the way in.
NARRATOR: Doctor Wendy aims for Nadirah’s uterus.
DR. BETSY: Good girl.
DR. WENDY: I'm a few inches off.
DR. BETSY: Okay. DR. WENDY: So close.
So I'm wondering if, um...
DR. BETSY: Do you want...
DR. WENDY: Doctor Ryan wants to try to stick his hand
‘cause he has longer arms.
DR. RYAN: I'll give it a try.
I'm gonna get messy.
Let's hope I don’t strike out, huh?
DR. RYAN: I think I have some extra breeches in my office.
DR. WENDY: Try to come back towards her feet, you know what I mean?
Oh, there we go. Hold on.
That is tip of the uterus right there.
DR. RYAN: Mm-hmm. DR. WENDY: Mm-hmm.
There's a lot of vasculature there.
Looks suspicious of a pregnant elephant.
NARRATOR: Doctor Wendy sees extra blood flow in the area,
a positive sign.
But even with Doctor Ryan’s long arms,
the key shot lies out of view.
DR. RYAN: It appears that part of the uterus that we need
to image has already fallen over the brim of the pelvis so
we can't access it with the angles and the depth that
we can, we can access in there.
(trumpets)
ERIN: Even though we weren't able to see an actual photo of
the elephant baby there were still signs on the ultrasound
that indicates she is pregnant,
so I still feel really good about it.
The gestation for an elephant is 22 months,
so it is almost two years.
We have several opportunities to try to get another one.
NARRATOR: Back at Vero Beach, early morning crowds gather for
a race with a difference.
RACHEL (over speaker): Welcome to the 15th annual
Tour de Turtle!
(cheering)
RACHEL: The sea turtle conservancy created the Tour de Turtles program,
helping to release turtles every single year here at
Disney’s Vero Beach Resort.
So here we have two female loggerhead sea turtles that
successfully deposited their nests on the beach last night.
And right now we're here applying satellite transmitters
to the top of their shell.
Our two sea turtles are swimming alongside 19 other sea turtles
that are participating in the Tour de Turtles this year.
From locations all throughout the Caribbean.
NARRATOR: The trackers allow biologists to monitor
sea turtles away from their nesting beaches.
RACHEL: These transmitters don’t harm the turtle at all and
they fall off naturally after a couple of years.
They’re gonna help us learn really valuable information
about the foraging pathways of several sea turtle species,
their migrations, how and when and why they use these different habitats,
so that we can be sure to best protect them in
the areas that matter most.
RACHEL (over speaker): All right, it's the moment we’ve all been waiting for.
Five, four, three, two, one.
(cheering).
NARRATOR: The mamas will swim hundreds or even
thousands of miles to reach their foraging grounds.
RACHEL (over speaker): And they are off,
not to return for probably
two more years to this nesting beach to come and lay more eggs.
NARRATOR: As the turtles begin their long migration,
the work at Disney goes on.
RACHEL: We've seen our green turtle population numbers
go up across the state of Florida,
and our loggerhead sea turtle population is remaining stable.
My biggest hope is that this trend will be mirrored
in populations across the rest of the world.
That’s why we're all in this role and
we're committed for the long haul.
NARRATOR: Walt Disney’s dream was to create living,
breathing parks for guests to enjoy.
Here, thousands of cast members nurture that dream and
help it to flourish.
Through happy times and sad.
DR. NATALIE: We had to make the hard decision of
euthanizing Spike.
Despite the fact that it was devastating for us,
it was something that we needed to do.
He was getting worse and we needed to make
the right decision for him.
These are some of the hardest days.
For me, being able to meet these gorillas, meet Spike...
RACHEL: Yeah.
DR. NATALIE: And to work with you guys,
I've been able to spend so much time with them and
I've learnt so much more and we've had hard times...
RACHEL: Yeah.
DR. NATALIE: And you guys have been able to get them through
the hard times and keep them as a cohesive friendly group.
And to me that’s been remarkable and a highlight of my career to
be able to do that.
RACHEL: Thank you.
So I'm gonna give these guys a call and we’ll watch the boys
come out and you can kinda get a feel for how they're doing now.
Hey, are you guys ready to ship boys out?
WOMAN (over radio): They're coming out now.
DR. NATALIE: Here we go. RACHEL: Oh there's Gus.
Yes, our old man.
NARRATOR: The bachelor gorillas are still coming to terms with
the loss of Spike.
RACHEL: So see normally Kejana would run...
Hey, bud.
He's looking back, he's making sure Gus is there.
He's definitely adjusting.
DR. NATALIE: How’s Zawadi been doing?
RACHEL: Zawadi used to always pace himself according to Spike
so Spike was often very slow because of his...
DR. NATALIE: Yeah.
RACHEL: Disability, and you can see he's coming right out,
he's moving out further because he doesn’t have
to do that anymore.
You know, they were together for 25 years.
And so it's a complete change.
It's really interesting because gorillas actually do
seem to grieve almost like people.
It's, it's been really hard for the gorillas.
And it's been really hard for the caregivers as well.
I want them to understand how proud we are of them for all
the efforts they gave for Spike and how much better
they really did make his life.
I think that is the one thing to be said about being a keeper and
being a vet is that this is, this is kind of what we signed
up for is we know this is gonna happen and we make things work
and we move forward, even when the bad things happen,
and I think that’s, that’s what makes us so strong.
We’ll, we’ll all get through it because that’s
what we can do for Spike.
DR. NATALIE: Let me give you a hug.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.