Panda Bears

It seemed too much to put it all in one post, so I saved the panda bears for their very own. On our last day in Sichuan, we went to the Panda Research Base in Chengdu. I recently saw a Discovery Channel special describing the work at this research center. Evidently, they now have the highest success rate in breeding giant pandas in captivity. Giant pandas are endangered because their habitat is slowly being encroached upon by humans and pandas need large expanses of land on which to exist because of the amount of bamboo they need to survive. There are only about 1500 panda remaining in the wild. They have 200 additional pandas at this research base, many of whom were born and raised here (experiments to introduce these pandas into the wild haven't met with much success).

We weren't allowed pictures of them, but the highlight of the visit was the nursery. We saw five 2-4 month pandas. They were sooo cute... fluffy, playful little creatures that were just barely learning to navigate around the nursery. They kept tipping over and rolling around on the ground. The guide had to peel me away from the window to go see the older pandas. As you can see from the photo, the older pandas were pretty cute too. The first photo shows a couple of 1 year old pandas (equivalent to about 4 human years) sleeping the afternoon away. The second shows an adult panda sleeping. It turns out that pandas sleep about 8 hours per day and eat another 8 hour per day, so most of those that we saw were doing one or the other. We saw about 20 pandas at the research base. I'm told that we were really lucky that day because often visitors only get to see 2-4.

I apologize for the dark photos. It was about 4pm when we got there (due to the flight delay described in the earlier post) and the sun was starting to go down, so there wasn't much light for photos.