Rain keeps Maggie the elephant from her new friends

Maggie is ready to join the gang. And the gang is ready for her.

Now if it would just stop raining.

Mud is the only thing keeping the fence up between Maggie and the four other African elephants at the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary in Northern California.

Pat Derby, founder of the sanctuary, said near-record rainfall in San Andreas has soaked the grounds where Maggie and the other elephants hang out during the day.

Generally, that's not bad for the elephants, which according to updates on the PAWS Web site have been having fun sliding down muddy hillsides.

But it has delayed plans to integrate Maggie. Since she left the Alaska Zoo three months ago, she has been separated by a fence from the other elephants for her own safety.

Sanctuary workers expect some serious body-bumping when Maggie finally joins the herd -- that's how elephants say howdy. They want to make sure she can withstand the full-body contact.

At first that meant giving Maggie time to roam the sanctuary and build muscle strength in her legs. Now it means making sure there's solid footing under her feet.

"We worry about the mud, Maggie slipping in the mud, falling down, and all the others getting excited," Derby said in a video update on the PAWS Web site.

About 5 inches of rain soaked Calaveras County in January, according to news reports. Until the ground dries and hardens -- maybe in a couple of weeks, Derby said -- Maggie will remain the odd elephant out.

In the meantime, the elephants continue to commune by touching trunks through the fence and keeping tabs on one another.

Days ago, the other elephants started spending a lot of the day high on a hillside, out of Maggie's view. She made her displeasure known with a series of bellows and roars.

"Maggie's got a mouth on her," Derby said -- and she doesn't tolerate being separated from the others. Keepers opened a gate that let her follow the others along the fence line.

Maggie discovered a brush pile and some scrub oak on her side of the fence, and Derby said she delighted in showing off her treasures to the other elephants, who had no brush pile on their side of the fence.

"She was so cocky," Derby said.

Then Maggie found a scrub oak, maybe 5 or 6 feet tall, and attacked it.

"She pushed and pushed, and then pop! Maggie successfully killed her first tree," Derby said.

Maggie's triumphant moment appears on video on the PAWS Web site.

(Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)