FOR THE LOVE OF PANDAS

It’s nine o’clock in the morning of July 22, 2009 in Ya’an, Sichuan. An event that occurs only once every 500 years is taking place: a total eclipse of the sun. Standing under the eaves, Huang Zhi and Luo Bo watch the pens some 100 metres away sink into darkness at the Ya’an Bifeng Gorge base of the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center.

The storm on the previous night had damaged the power supply circuits. Within the entire 716,000-square-metre compound, the only light now emits from the maternity and nursery wards, powered by their own generators.

The rain keeps pelting down, with heavy clouds blotting out the sky. Although they are unable to witness the eclipse, both Huang and Luo, the two directors of the Department of Animal Management at the Center, are in high spirits. After an entire night’s waiting, together with panda breeder Feng Gao-zhi, they had just delivered a pair of twin “sons” with their own hands, the first delivery for Nana the panda.

This first pair of panda twins born in 2009 is also a lucky pair: a month before they were born, the Center had signed an agreement for a three-year panda conservation plan with auto-mobile giant Mercedes-Benz China. The company pledged to help improve the living conditions of baby pandas through its Green Legacy Program, a specialised fund for nature conservation it had launched in 2007. Christening the twins Xing Hui and Xing Rui respectively, the company committed to funding the twins for the duration of their lives.

Early Days

The total solar eclipse over the Bifeng Gorge has shocked the 13 baby pandas born shortly after the Wenchuan Earthquake in May 2008. They stop playing and grab hold of the trees, looking up to the sky in confusion.

Meanwhile, Li Guo, the chief of the nursery, has just checked on Xing Hui’s nursing crate. The little fella is lying on its front quietly, sound asleep under a piece of panda hide. The warmth of the box and the softness of the hide provide the baby panda with a strong sense of security. Owing to his relatively undeveloped senses of sight and hearing, his sweet dreams have been thankfully uninterrupted by the din and uproar ensuing from the eclipse.

Xing Hui is the first baby panda resident of the nursery this year. Like all other newborn baby pandas, he doesn’t look very attractive. His body, the size of a rat, is a flushed red and furless all over, with the characteristic black and white fur distinctly absent. Care-givers liken the appearance of these tiny baby mammals to skinned rats.

The panda nursery is located next to the “Panda Kindergarten,” both of which belong to the Mercedes-Benz Giant Panda Theme Park. The panda twins will spend half of their first six months in the nursery, after which they will begin schooling at the kindergarten with other baby pandas of the same age group.

In addition to four pens, the kindergarten also boasts two open-air amusement parks. At the centre of each park stands a wooden platform over a metre high, with six small trees each about two metres high planted at small intervals around it. Two tyres – playthings for the baby pandas – hang from one of the trees.