Friday, February 15, 2013


Wolong Panda Preserve
Sichuan Province, China
Trip Log, Day two at the Wolong Panda Preserve
November, 2006

Today is our second day panda trip at the Wolong Panda Preserve.  This morning we met at 8:00 A.M. as usual, for breakfast in the Panda Inn dining room.  This is where we eat most of our meals while at the panda preserve.  The restaurant staff is always friendly and very quick with service.  As soon as I sat down they brought me tea.  We eat our meals traditional Chinese family style, so everyone has the opportunity to taste many different dishes.  For breakfast I usually eat a plain bread roll and a hard boiled egg.  There are many more choices, but I eat light in the morning.

We were all excited and anxious prior to beginning our first work day here at the preserve.  We were told to meet our “masters” at 8:30 inside the panda garden.  The masters are the panda keepers, trainers and veterinarians who will be our mentors during our volunteer work days. 




Each of us was assigned his or her own master, who we will work with and assist as they perform their regular work chores.  Each of these professionals has a regular schedule of pandas they care for.  The number of pandas varies from 1 to 5 or 6 depending on what work effort is required for the individual animals.

My panda trainers name is Sung.  She is a very experienced panda trainer who had only one panda in her care while I was there.  Sung was responsible for rehabilitating and training Drong Drong.  He is an addition to the Panda Garden who was discovered by local mountain villagers.  When they found him he was sick and in need of care.  The Preserve rescued him from the wild.  This is how many pandas find their way to the panda preserve.

Sung was given the responsibility of getting Drong into good physical shape and then to train him with all the behaviors necessary for him to become one of the strong male breeders.  She must train him to react to many instructions including climbing into the cage that is used for physical inspection and manipulation by the veterinarians.  This training is time intensive, which is why Sung had only Drong Drong to care for.

At 8:30 we all walked from the dining room over to the Panda Garden, just a few hundred yards away.  It is a real treat to come out of the hotel in the morning, walk to the preserve and be one of only a handful of people in the park.

The Panda Garden is vibrantly alive in the early morning.  There is usually a misty haze covering the mountains that climb steeply from both sides of this narrow river canyon.  The pandas know that the keepers are on their way with the morning treats.  They look forward to receiving the days supply of fresh green tender bamboo.  Every enclosure has pandas on the move.  Up in trees, down along walking lanes and just sitting near the entrances to their private homes, the pandas are all waiting.

I was introduced to Sung, who is a get to it, straight forward kind of person, just as I am.  We hit it off right from the start.  Sung has limited English and I have very limited Chinese, but we had no communication problems whatsoever.

The first thing Sung did was take me to the bakery where we picked up the morning ration of panda cake.  Panda cake is made from a special formula developed at the Wolong Panda Preserve.  The mix consists of corn meal, ground bamboo, carrots, apple, oil and some other tasty ingredients.  It is considered too rough on the digestive system for humans to eat, but of course I had to take a taste.  Like corn bread, but better!  The finished panda cakes are wheels about 10” in diameter and 3 or 4 inches thick.

The pandas love this tasty treat which makes it perfect to use as a training aid.  Because it is vitamin and calorie loaded, it is very good for those pandas being rehabilitated after rescue from bad situations in the wild

Once Sung had carefully measured out the morning quota of panda cake for Drong Drong we grabbed a large two wheeled cart, a couple of rakes, a scooping device and headed over to Drong’s enclosure.

Baby pandas are cute and cuddly and we all want to hug them.  Adult pandas are kind of cuddly appearing too, until you see the very large bear-like claws.  We are instructed to stay out of reach of those sharp claws, which they use to defend themselves in the wild.

Using the panda cake, Sung began the morning training session with Drong Drong.  First she had him sit on the scale that is permanently mounted in one corner of his house.  Drong weighed in at 106 kilos.  Sung said that was good.  This is close to Drong’s ideal weight.  They estimated his age at about 8 years old.

Next Sung put Drong through a series of stretching and flexibility exercises.  These are designed to strengthen his hind quarters ( a weak point in panda design).  This strengthening will make Drong a better breeding panda male.

When the exercises were complete for the moment, but some panda cake remained, Sung handed it to me and motioned that I should break it up into bite sized pieces and hand feed Drong Drong.  I accepted this assignment with a big smile on my face.

Drong knew to sit against the cage door and place his face close to the bars.  He would open his mouth and stick his long pink tongue out, then wait for me to place a bite onto his tongue.  I couldn’t resist enticing him to lick my hand.  (I probably wasn’t supposed to do that because I imagine putting your hand inside a pandas mouth could be considered dangerous.)  I discovered that if I withheld the panda cake, just a moment, Drong would lean forward and stick his tongue out even further. 

When he accidentally licked my right hand this way, I immediately pushed the small piece of cake into his mouth while his tongue was still touching me.  We did this a couple times in a row and Drong being the smart guy that he is, picked up on the routine.  From then on when I placed my hand just outside the bars Drong would lean forward and give my hand a good lick.  When I related this experience later, I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of our group who got their hand licked.

Anyway, after this training exercise Sung closed Drong Drong inside his house while she and I went into the outside enclosure and cleaned the fallen leaves from the moat.   I guess fishing for leaves took us an hour or so.  Then we returned to the workers private area, where we had a 45 minute wait until the next training and feeding exercise.  I left the employee rest area and wondered alone through the panda garden, enjoying my private time here at the Preserve.

My second session that morning with Drong was a repeat of the first one, except there was no cage cleaning required.  We just put Drong Drong through his training exercises and hand fed him panda cake.  My morning work period ended around 11:15 AM. 

I went back to my room and organized some notes while waiting to meet everyone else for lunch.  Lunch found all of us over talkative and excited about our morning.  Not one of us was disappointed in how the morning had gone.  The “work” was really not difficult.  Raking leaves and scooping a few piles of bamboo green panda poop barely qualified as work. 

A special training session was scheduled for Drong Drong in the afternoon.  So immediately after lunch Sung and I took some more panda cake and put Drong through his regular exercise training program one more time.  Then a short rest break, which I used to explore a different part of the Panda Garden.  Around 2:30 Sung and I wondered back to Drong Drong’s cage where we met with two of the vets and the head panda keeper.

Sung called Drong over to the door to his house.  The training cage was already pushed up against the bars.  One of the others slid the bars aside and Sung directed Drong Drong into the small training and handling cage.  Drong obediently crawled inside.  At Sung’s direction he lay down on his back and extended his right arm through the main cage into a specially built appendage that sticks out one side of the cage.  This small cage encloses the pandas arm and paw. 

The small arm cage makes it easier and safer for the veterinarians to work on the pandas.  The arm is exposed so that if they need to draw blood samples or to give injections the pandas arm is exposed and accessible.

Next Sung had our panda grasp the bars on the side of the cage with each of his four paws.  To reward him, Sung used a small training clicker which she repeatedly clicked, just as she fed him small pieces of panda cake.  Over time the clicker noise becomes attached to the taste of the panda cake and the animal can be rewarded with just the clicker.  This is important because the rich panda cake must be rationed.  Too much is not good for the pandas digestive system and causes a very messy clean up the next morning.

The training exercise consumed our afternoon work period.  Once we had muscled the cage back into the panda house and released Drong Drong to his outside enclosure, Sung said we had another 45 minute break before the next session. 

I used this time to watch some of the baby pandas being hand fed their bottles.  The babies are fed and cared for inside a special nursery area.  The workers are very protective of the babies.  For some reason the public is not allowed to look at the baby pandas when they are out getting some sunshine or playing.  The only time the public can view the panda babies is when they are in the nursery being cared for.

Us volunteer workers were able to sit alongside the babies as they played and just lay in the warm sunshine, soaking up the sparse mountain sun.  Each baby had his or her own personality.  At two months of age they were still not real strong and active.  Most of them would just lay and enjoy the warmth of the sun.  However, there was one precocious child who would not stay with the group.  As soon as he was placed on the warm asphalt, he began crawling away from the group.  His babysitter would let him get about 10 yards from the others, then she would scoop him up and carry him back to the others.  This action was repeated over and over all the time I watched the squirming pile of panda babies.

My last work session of the day began around 3:00 and went until 4:00 PM.  We carried some fresh bamboo over to the cage and took away the old stuff.  Then Drong did his exercises one last time that day.  By that time he had the hand licking routine down pat.  I placed my hand next to the cage, he would reach out and give me a big tongue swipe and I would place some panda cake on top of his tongue. 

Drong being a male panda can be really vocal.  The males like to make noise while going through their exercises or while just sitting around wasting the day away.  The females are quieter and more reserved. 

My “work day” was finished at 4:00.  Dinner was at 6:00 PM so I had two hours to go and explore a nearby canyon.  There is a stream that runs from this canyon and it looked like it would be a great spot to explore alone.  I put on a warm jacket and headed out to see what was up that canyon.

15 minutes up the trail I came to an old animal enclosure.  I learned this was where they sometimes housed new pandas when they first arrived at the Panda Preserve in the earlier years when the preserve was just getting started.

The trail was steep and slippery.  The mountains are always misty.  Light rain showers are not uncommon here in the foothills.  The stream flowed quite fast with many gurgling ponds.  It seemed like the perfect environment for trout, but the local people all assured me there were no fish in the streams.

There were dozens of mushrooms.  Everywhere you looked there were various fungi growing.  Golden yellow, wood brown and even some that looked like they would glow in the dark.  I was really tempted to collect some, but the danger from eating strange mushrooms kept me from gathering any.  Next time I will find a local expert to walk with me and gather some fresh mushrooms.

I got back to the hotel in time to shower before dinner.  Dinner consisted of 8 or 9 different dishes.  Every meal is an adventure all its own.  By now we all had a favorite dish we liked to see, but the other dishes were always something new and interesting to taste.  In the mountains, peppers and cabbage are two staple foods and each meal had at least one dish of each.  There was always some type of chicken or fish and usually a pork dish as well.  Several tasty vegetable dishes were also the norm.

That night I planned to go out in search of a wild leopard, so as soon as we finished eating I went to my room for a nap, while everyone else took off to explore the countryside around the Panda Preserve.

All in all my first day of work at the Wolong Panda Preserve was everything I hoped it would be.  I could not have asked for anything different than what I got.  Because this is a real life experience that unfolds in real time as the panda trainers go about their daily work, every persons experience is different. 

I was the only one whose panda licked their hand.  I like to think that is because Drong Drong and I formed an instant and very special bond.  But probably it was because Drong is a pretty smart guy and figured out right away what I wanted from him.  Of course I have lots of animal training experience which might have helped us get the hand licking action down right away.

That’s all I have time to write at the moment.  I hope you enjoyed my first day volunteering at the preserve as much as I did.
Keith


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