A Glorious Glimpse of the Cub

Visitors Get a Fleeting 10 Minutes To Ogle Panda in His Public Debut

By the time the last people in line were allowed into the National Zoo's Panda House yesterday for Tai Shan's public debut, the baby bear was in a back den, where a partial furry view could be had by leaning far forward, almost to the point of tipping over.

"I see his head," one woman in front told her small child. "Pick me up!" a girl in a pink down jacket demanded of her mother. A man held his camera high, pointed to the viewfinder and said to his boy, "There he is!"

"Is he doing anything, Maya?" a man called out from the last row. "Is he doing anything?"

It seemed this group would not be fortunate, unlike others that happily watched the cub frolic, gambol and slide during the first day the public was let in to see the 5-month-old Tai Shan. Some individual visitors hit the jackpot, too -- a class of third-graders on a field trip from Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Falls Church, a family of four from Hawaii and a number of others who showed up with no expectation of getting in were granted admittance to the Panda House. There were no monster lines. By noon, 10 tickets were still left for takers willing to show up in the 30-degree chill.

Jean Simmonds tumbled out of bed in Crystal City and took Metro to the zoo, even though she had no guarantee she'd get anywhere near the cub. Although all 600 advance timed-entry tickets for yesterday had been grabbed up on the zoo's Web site, she knew that a few dozen more would be given out to same-day visitors, starting at 8 each morning, at a booth across from the Panda House. By 9:30, she had scored one for herself and a friend.

Simmonds phoned her clients at the Pentagon City hair salon where she works and told them she couldn't do their highlights yesterday. "If you get a chance to do something historical," she said, "it's worth it."

The zoo's tickets allow visitors to spend about 10 minutes inside the Panda House for free. But such is the demand to see Tai Shan -- whose species is one of the world's rarest, with only 160 in zoos and perhaps 10 times that number in the wild -- that a resale market has developed on outlets including eBay. Tai Shan's parents are on a 10-year loan from China, and he is to go there after his second birthday.

Four sets of tickets have sold this week on the online auction site for $103.49 to $210.33. Perhaps to counter criticism, some sellers promised to donate profits to the zoo, but at least one dropped out of the ticket-selling business after complaining of "all the ignorant morons who sent me e-mails saying I should be ashamed or calling me names."

Zoo officials warned that they will inspect identification of the main ticket-holder to curb resale and fraud, but they did not appear to check everybody yesterday. They also tried to lower expectations of panda visitors, stating that a sighting is not guaranteed. The baby panda, after all, is an animal, with unpredictable behavior.

When the Thomas Jefferson third-graders got in to see him at 10:30, Tai Shan was in the back den with his mother, Mei Xiang. The cub's father, Tian Tian, who has not met his offspring and probably never will, was eating bamboo outdoors. The students had gone to the zoo to visit the other animals and were thrilled just to get inside the Panda House.

"You could do this," said Beth Cashin, demonstrating how she pitched forward, "and see him."

"He was rolling around," Caroline Jarrard said.