The adorable pandas of Chengdu

8 month old panda baby 

Chengdu, China's Panda Breeding Center is pure joy.  We're here leading a group of 11 of us on a very busy trip to China, so I'm going to be blogging out of sequence, starting with the adorable Giant Panda babies we visited today.

There are about 2400 Giant Pandas alive in the world today, about half of them in captivity in zoos, breeding centers and panda reserves where these charming animals are protected.  The Giant Panda was on the road to extinction before China started capturing injured and starving animals in the wild and putting them in what amounts to protective custody.

a wistful little guy

Pandas are solitary creatures, setting up territories in bamboo forests.  Several factors have led to their near-demise.  Female pandas ovulate only once a year.  If the female is not near a male, she does not breed that year, losing a precious opportunity to reproduce.
Newborn babies are tiny rat-like creatures, 1/1000th the size of their mothers.  A first-time mother may not know what to do with her baby, which has almost no hair, unformed ears and closed eyes, a totally helpless, but squirmy and screechy infant.  So, the baby may die from neglect or injury.
The bamboo forests of China are nearly gone, so many Giant Pandas have starved to death.  They can only absorb about 30% of the food value of the bamboo, so have to eat large quantities of a vanishing resource to survive.  While they also eat meat, they are slow-moving animals who can rarely catch prey.  China has set aside reserves of bamboo forest and is trying, slowly, to move some of the pandas it is breeding into the wild.  Last year, they released a male and female after several years of living in semi-wild conditions.  Only the female survived.  The male was done in by a would-be mate who apparently did not appreciate his advances.

babies are playful

Last year, 24 babies were born at the Chengdu breeding center, with an amazing 23 surviving. The babies are taken from their mothers at birth to protect them and put in incubators. They are put with their mothers 2 to 3 hours daily to nurse.  In between, the handlers milk the mothers by feeding them honey-dipped bamboo sticks through the bars of their enclosures while a second handler actually milks the mother, who happily cares only about the honey and bamboo.

mother panda enjoying her bamboo

Chengdu is hot and humid in the summer and cold and frosty in the winter.  The pandas prefer the winter in their fluffy black and white coats.  In the summer, they could die from the heat, so their handlers move them inside to stay cool during the middle part of the day.
We watched as handlers coaxed the 6 to 8 month old babies into their arms to cart them to their large inside enclosures.  When the babies saw them coming, they raced up the trees to avoid being taken inside.  With a lot of wheedling, they eventually clambered down from the trees and allowed their handlers to cuddle them in their arms.
This breeding center also raises red pandas, related to raccoons.  They have enclosures, but frequently run along the walkways greeting the thousands of visitors.

red panda

baby escaping from handler

deciding it's time to come down

on its way

giving in to its handler