We left Chengdu early for Bifengxia, home of many captive pandas, but before we left, we walked down to Starbucks for one last cup of joe and to buy some souvenir coffee cups. The irony was that the cups were made in Seattle.
Chengdu still has a lot of bicyclists and electric mopeds. They even have separate lanes for them. So, while the streets are clogged with cars, there is still a sizeable two-wheel component.
The bus ride to Bifengxia is almost two hours and on the way Sammy tells us about her experience in Wolong with the zoo group when the earthquake struck the area. It’s quite a tale and she is an excellent storyteller. Her story is doubly impressive since she is telling it in English for us.
Bifengxia is in a rural area. The big panda breeding center up is in the mountains. The road up to the reserve is winding and long, but very beautiful. Finally, at last, I could see the China depicted by landscape painters like Wang Hui. There was even a fogfall cascading over a distant mountain range.
We had a brief meeting with the head of the panda reserve. I’m not sure that he was a scientist, but more of an administrator. He told us the aim of the center was to release the Giant Panda back into the wild, although he didn’t address how they were going to reverse the habitat destruction or prevent the intrusion of man into the panda breeding areas. Logging is a big issue and it appears that the Giant Panda needs old growth trees for den sites.
However, habitat destruction isn’t the only obstacle for a wild release facing this center’s pandas. The way that the panda reserve houses the animals is a cause for concern, too. Here, as in the Chengdu park, they have the babies living communally. They are taken from their mothers at about six months so that the center can breed the adult females again, rather than allowing the cubs to remain with their mothers for more than a year and a half. All these factors are bound to produce unnatural behaviors that might be a detriment to captive animals released in the wild.
The center also allows tourists for a fee to enter the cages and pose with the animals or play with the babies. How can these animals ever adapt to the wild if they are habituating to humans?
Certainly, using some animals as ambassadors for public education is a reasonable thing to do, but then label them as such. To give lip service to the idea of releasing any of these animals into the wild is absurd and as far as I’m concerned just a eco-talking point to make foreign tourists feel that they are “helping” the pandas.
No doubt the Chinese biologists know that if they want to be serious about reintroducing the Giant Panda back into its habitat they will need to minimize all human contact with these animals when they are in captivity. That includes limiting the contact of the pandas with the keepers, as well as, the tourists. The animals will need to be housed individually since they are by nature solitary creatures and they will need to change their breeding schedule to allow the mothers to remain with their cubs for much, much longer. I suppose that some of the overcrowding in this panda reserve might be due to the closing of Wolong after that devastating earthquake in 2008.
I wish that I saw a greater emphasis on basic research on the pandas in the wild, rather than an expansion of these tourist parks. There are large gaps in our knowledge about the Giant Panda’s natural history. Funding basic research might prove more important than ramping up a captive breeding program.
Right now, more than 15% of the world’s Giant Panda population are held in captivity. If logging resumes in the panda’s habitat, the wild population numbers may decline further. In that case, it is going to become especially important to replicate natural conditions for the captive population.
Don’t get me wrong. The animals are well cared for at the panda reserve here and the keepers seem absolutely dedicated to their animals, but most of the adults and sub-adults showed signs of stress, probably due to crowding and human contact. In fact, it was telling that of the two sub-adult animals chosen for the optional photo shoot, only one could be used. When our group entered the compound, one of the pandas came down out of his tree and bit his keeper on the ankle. That animal had to be kept away from the people taking the photograph with the other panda. I can imagine that the center wouldn’t like a panda to take a chunk out of a tourist.
The whole setup saddened me. I know that everyone means well, but, as Mark Twain once said, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
OK, I’m off my soapbox. And, yes, the babies were very, very cute. They are right off the standard cuteness scale. They are charming as only young animals can be.
The beds in our Bifengxia are rock hard. I think that we are lying on box springs without a mattress on top. There is also an interesting assortment of bugs parading through the room.
