Nandi notebook: 9 months and queen of the hill

Each month, as Nandi bounds closer to her first birthday on Aug. 20, we will keep you in the know on what’s new with this precious pachyderm’s progress.

Sue Tygielski, Reid Park Zoo‘s elephant manager, has the skinny on Tucson’s big baby.

Age: Nine months — can you believe it? — Wednesday, May 20.

Weight: As Tygielski puts it, Nandi is now a “chunker,” weighing in at about 820 pounds.

Alas, a baby no more: “I have to say, she is almost beyond the baby point,” Tygielski says. “She is starting to look like a kid.” Sniff. Sniff. And on a more, er, biological note: “Her poop is starting to look more like an adult’s,” Tygielski says, which is a result of eating more hay and leaves.

Real training: With maturity comes training — and an increasing attention span. “She stays with us and follows us for a whole session,” Tygielski says. For Nandi’s new move, trainers instruct her to put her trunk on top of her head. She also recognizes her name and individual trainers — behaving better for some than others. “Little stinker,” Tygielski adds.

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Pampered pachyderm: Nandi has learned the joy of a massage. “She loves to have her legs brushed like a horse,” Tygielski says. “She will stand there and stand there, and we’ll be working with her mom, and it takes longer, and Nandi usually gets in the way. We can’t feed her the whole time, so now we will just brush her legs.”

Afraid of the deep end: Nandi’s first swim might have scared her off — she and mom Semba stay far away from the water while the other elephants splash. Instead she wallows in the mud. As it gets hotter, the keepers will encourage another dip.

Duck tales: “She is still climbing on balls a lot, but now she tries to stand on her hind legs and balance on them,” Tygielski says. “The other thing she just started doing is, like her brothers, she is chasing the ducks. Ducks will come (into the exhibit) and she has to chase them off. She will flair her ears and run after them with her head down. They fly away five feet and just stop and look at her like, ‘What are you doing?’ Once they are too far away from Mom, she’ll stop.”

Brotherly love: Nandi splits her time between her mom and brother Sundzu. “She slips and falls, and you have to believe that some of it is purposeful to get her brothers to play with her,” Tygielski says. “It’s sweet for Sundzu to have a buddy ... He will lay on his stomach so he is at her level and wrestle with his trunk.”

Queen of the hill: “For Mother’s Day, Semba got all kinds of giant boxes covered in colored paper with hay and produce inside,” Tygielski says. Nandi, paper lover that she is, ripped the paper off and took a lap. Though she is eating more tree leaves from boughs, she still enjoys parading with paper and branches. Tygielski adds, “Sometimes she’ll run to the top of a sand hill and wave it like she is waving a flag.”