Chengdu is not only the capital of Sichuan province, but the capital of Pandas!
They have successfully bred hundreds of pandas here and they even reintroduced one to the wild last year and he seems to be doing well. Each enclosure has different age groups together and the young ones are far more active than the adults (who just sit on their backsides, eat bamboo and look cute).
Every spring the appropriate Pandas are put together but, as they don’t like sex very much, they usually artificially inseminate them in the laboratory. Six babies were born in August and in the maternity wing you can view the mothers without disturbing them via monitors. Via the live video feed, you see the keeper pass a bowl of milk to the mother panda and simultaneously swipe the baby to check up on it. Then the keeper appears on your right and pops the baby panda in an incubator right next to the glass. It’s amazing to see them so close up – and they are the cutest things we have ever seen. They can be as small as 60 grams when born and don’t open their eyes for a month. They are incubated and bottle-fed as necessary and monitored carefully until they are several months old.
One of the twins with his paws over his ears!
