Bear With Us: Another Panda Story

Those who grew attached to San Diego's Hua Mei, the first American-born panda, know how quickly the years pass. Born in the summer of 1999, she was sent back to China in 2003. (Due to the SARS epidemic, she got an extended stay at the San Diego Zoo.) Since her move, she has given birth to two sets of twins, the most recent born in late August. She cares for one of the twins and the other is kept in the nursery. (Panda mothers generally abandon one cub when twins are born.)

I caught a glimpse of one of the twins at Wolong -- he was sleeping in the nursery's panda crib. In order to learn specific information about the pandas, such as which baby belonged to Hua Mei, I had to ask reserve employees, most of whom have very limited English.

Sonja Kalo, a visitor from Switzerland, told me that she came to the reserve to volunteer for a week. "I clean the cages and act as a panda keeper," she says. "I've always wanted to do this."

The reserve welcomes volunteers, Kalo said, but she warned that they must be prepared to come with plenty of money. Panda protection is the goal, so the reserve charges a daily fee for visitors as well as volunteers.

If you aren't up for the rough trek to Wolong, there's always the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center, established in 1987. Like the Wolong reserve, the center is dedicated to enlarging the panda population. Although it lacks Wolong's mountainous terrain and wild feel, it's a convenient half-hour drive from Chengdu's downtown, and the pandas there are plentiful. Visitors can watch as the center's 46 pandas climb trees and peel their breakfast bamboo.

Although information isn't plentiful at Chengdu either, English-speaking tour guides can provide a few helpful details about the pandas, explaining which ones are twins and which ones came from Japanese zoos. A 20-minute film explains the panda plight and the artificial insemination process, from sperm collecting to egg implanting. A panda museum should be ready for viewing by summer of 2006.

The major highlight of both Wolong and the Chengdu Breeding Center: panda hugging.

Yes, for about $100, you can hold a baby panda. In order to preoccupy the panda, an apple or a bamboo stick is slipped into its paws before it's plopped on your lap. The little guys are squirmy, have big claws and eat fast, so the bonding is over in an instant.

When I visited the center, Mike Masters, a Knoxville, Tenn., native living in Chengdu, was posing with a red panda. Masters, who teaches English in Chengdu, had a smile the size of Montana. It was the "I just held a panda" smile.

-- Laurie Burkitt