Meeting the last pandas
I want to give up. It’s too depressing. It’s too infuriating. I just want to shake these people and shout at them STOP! What part of conservation don’t you understand?
I’m talking about the Chinese industrial machine and its insatiable appetite for construction. Nothing gets in the way. You think they’re going to listen to some wildlife warrior who wants to save a national icon and the face of global conservation? Not on your life. There’s money to be made, mouths to feed and people to house. That’s this generation but is there hope for the next one? Can we change their minds and their attitude to conservation? I hope so, because that’s the only thing that will save these incredible animals being wiped off the face of the planet forever.
Nothing prepares you for meeting a panda. They don’t quite seem real. They’re too cuddly to be real. But they are real, and I met them at the Chengu Research Base for Breeding Pandas. I first met a nine-month-old panda named Tan Shung. At first, he didn’t want to come down from his tree but it was nothing a juicy stick of bamboo didn’t fix. He slowly climbed down to meet a new Australian friend and let me tell you, he wasn’t shy. He was like a giant wombat with muscular forearms and a sharp bite. He snuck up on me like a playful child and launched himself into my arms, biting and scratching along the way. In about five years, he’ll be ready to breed - perhaps that offspring will be reintroduced into the wild.
There are less than 1600 pandas left in the wild. Well, that was ten years ago. A new population survey is due out later this year and no one is expecting that number to have risen. Seeing China’s economic explosion up close is almost beyond comprehension. The Chinese middle class now knows what it’s like to have money and lots of it. They want to make more money and that means more construction, more bitumen and more housing. It’s hard to blame them. They’re looking after their families, feeding their children and trying to make a future for them - but they couldn’t be more shortsighted as they surge further and further into the panda’s habitat.
Wolong Nature Reserve is the perfect picture of ancient China. At Wolong we met pandas in enclosures ranging from fifty square metres to entire mountains. We came to visit the next pandas to be re-introduced into the wild. Right now, they’re enjoying a semi-wild environment at the top of one of the mountains surrounding the reserve. They’re monitored around the clock by closed circuit TV cameras and keepers have to minimize their contact with the pandas as much as possible. And that’s where our panda suits come in.
When our producer Paul Waterhouse told me we’d be wearing panda suits for this story, I honestly thought he was joking. But it’s all part of the experiment and who are we to argue with the people who are pioneering the reintroduction process? There are no humans in the wild so if we want to see these pandas we have to look like pandas, cameraman and all. I couldn’t help but think they were looking at us thinking, ‘What are those idiots doing?’ These guys are willing to try anything to get these pandas back to where they should be and I’m happy to look silly in the name of conservation. The suit was incredibly hot and our sound recordist Dan Abbott had a tough time sticking the microphone into the head of the suit. We got there in the end and off we trudged into one of the enclosures. Seeing a panda up close like that is hard to look away from. They are almost oblivious to us with all their attention on the hundredth stick of bamboo they’re munching on for the day. Again, they don’t quite seem real. I imagined them in the wild having never seen, heard, or smelt humans. Away from the sirens and trucks roaming the mountain tops with their whole wild life ahead of them. In a perfect world, the Wolong Nature Reserve wouldn’t exist.
I asked Dr. Sarah Bexell if she ever felt like giving up. All the time, she said. There are more trucks, more people, and more buildings than ever before and saving the panda, for many, is down the list of priorities.
The plucky American dedicates half her year to working at the Chengdu Research Base doing everything she can to fight the good panda fight. Sarah and her team are going into schools explaining the need to preserve this ancient species. She’s helped convince the Chinese government to buy more nature reserves and put more money towards conservation projects. What really struck me about this woman was her genuine fear for the future of pandas. She would know more than most just how bad the situation is. What used to be vast tracts of panda habitat are now just small dots on a map. She told me the only thing that will save pandas from extinction is massive changes to human behavior.
I’d only been there ten days and felt like giving up. Sarah’s been there more than ten years and she’s hanging in there. We need more people like Dr. Sarah Bexell.
After our close encounter with our furry friends our cameraman David Childs suggested a panda dance in my panda suit. I obliged thinking there was no way it would make it into the story. Call it a celebration of our time there, a celebration of what we’d seen and a celebration of the work being done there. Of course, it did make it into the story because it really was something to make a song and dance about. But it was only temporary and the grim reality of it all brought me crashing back to earth.
The Giant Panda is written in big bold letters on the list of endangered species. The day it’s off that list is a long way off. When that day comes there’s a good chance you’ll see a panda dancing in the street - and there’s an even better chance that panda will be me.
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