We Panda to Your Every Whim – The Fight to Save the Species
We Panda to Your Every Whim –
The Fight to Save the Species
Now I love wildlife and birds and so I am always excited to learn of new initiatives to preserve wildlife. Obviously I am a sucker for some super stars like the panda. And we are very lucky as the only giant pandas in the UK are in Edinburgh. The female is called Tian Tian (Sweetie) and the male is Yang Guang (Sunshine). Pandas are solitary animals have to be kept apart for most of the year, except for the mating season. They live exclusively on bamboo, which is a terrible diet and leaves them short of energy and flatulent. (My wife reading this over my shoulder leaned across and said,’My are you related to the giant panda?’ - I ask you!)
Eats Shoots and Leaves - And All in Panda Vision
Now in Edinburgh they have live video feeds so you can watch Yang Guang eat, sleep and occasionally walk in his enclosure, but essentially they don’t do a lot. But they are cuddly! The other kind of panda is the Red Panda, which is not really a relative, but is rather more active and fun to watch. And these pandas too are an endangered species and also to be found at the capital’s zoo. Red pandas also live mostly on bamboo, but will eat other foodstuff like bird eggs and insects, unlike the bamboo obsessed giant panda which can eat nothing else.
World Wide Programme
The red pandas in the capital are part of a worldwide breeding programme to save the species, which is more threatened than the giant panda, and which is under growing threat as habitat is lost in its native Himalayas The zoo’s resident male, Bruce, will soon be introduced to a female named Ginger. The pair have been left in side-by-side enclosures since Ginger’s arrival from the Netherlands. It is hoped that they will get on and eventually mate as there are fewer than 10,000 wild red pandas left in the world. Indeed the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland , RZSS, are getting another two male red pandas later in the year, so Bruce had better look to his laurels soon. The zoo hopes then to make a dedicated red panda enclosures in the capital. Already the RZSS at its Highland Wildlife Park has a breeding pair of red pandas who lived there since 2012. The female Kitty has already given birth and reared three baby red panda kits. The capital’s zoo hopes to replicate this success with the new arrivals and the patter of tiny red panda feet.
The Patter of Tiny Feet?
If you are celebrating the patter of tiny feet, an anniversary or family event don’t forget to sit down and have a browse of our lovely wares and offers and thanks your stars you can eat more than boring old bamboo.
