Thimmesh - Camp Panda: helping cubs return to the wild

P andas have evolved to eat a very special dietalmost exclusively bamboo. Because of bamboos low nutrient value, a panda must eat between twenty and forty pounds a day, even in winter, to gain the nutrition it needs. (This explains why the panda bear doesnt hibernate.)

The problem with this diet (aside from being difficult to digest) is that bamboo plants have periodic massive flowering periodsfollowed by massive die-offs. When these die-offs occur, the pandas source of food in an area completely and instantly disappearsputting the pandas in grave danger if they cannot locate more bamboo within their habitat.

A giant panda in the Wolong Nature Reserve chomps on bamboo. There are roughly twenty-five varieties of bamboo plants grown in the area where the pandas currently live. Pandas particularly like the umbrella, arrow, and golden bamboo varieties.

P andas are in peril because of humans! We caused the problem, so we have a responsibility to help fix it, exclaims Suzanne Braden, who, after visiting China and the Wolong Nature Reserve, was so moved by the plight of the panda that, when she returned to the United States, she cofounded the nonprofit Pandas International to help save the magnificent species.

Roughly a thousand years ago, an estimated twenty-three thousand pandas roamed wild and free through many thousands of miles of pristine, tranquil habitat in their native Chinacool, moist forests of mixed broadleaf trees, with plenty of canopy coverage and an abundance of bamboo. But within the last forty years, more than 50 percent of the pandas already shrinking habitat has been destroyed by humanssliced and diced and reduced to six small pockets of isolated land areas, most in southern China. This was a direct result of the growth of agriculture and industrialization, and an unprecedented growthmore of an explosion, actuallyin the human population.

The number of Chinese people grew from five hundred million in the 1950s to one billion just thirty years later and roughly 1.4 billion people today. (In comparison, the United States has about 325 million people.) More and more people meant more and more land needed for homes, businesses, schools, and farms. More agriculture meant more and more land was needed for planting crops and raising livestock. And infrastructure projects meant using more and more land to build roads, railways, bridges, and dams.

Much of this land was territory the panda traditionally roamed. Huge swaths of forest were logged and cleared out, obliterating vast areas and rendering them unsuitable for panda habitat.

It must have been a terrifying time for the pandas: chop chop chop, whoo whoo!, beep beepa cacophony of noise and chaos encroaching on their homes, destroying their food, their shelter... sending them scampering away to unfamiliar lands, higher and higher in the mountains.

A panda at Wolong hides out by a tree. For pandas here, as well as those in other reserves and in captivity, keepers are often able to distinguish one animal from another by the shape and size of their black eye patches; they all vary slightly.

Not only were pandas put at risk primarily due to habitat destruction and habitat encroachment by humans, but they were also shot and killed by humans: by trophy hunters (before hunting pandas was banned), by poachers (illegally killing pandas anyway, usually for their fur), and by local villagers protecting their livestock.

It was estimated that by the 1980s, a mere one thousand pandas remained in the wild. By 1990, they were officially declared an endangered species.