Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Confessions of a Bamboo Thief


 My work as a tour guide takes me to so many interesting places.  One of my favorite places is China.  China’s a huge country, with slightly less land area than the USA, but 4 times the population. 


When I’m in China, I always take my tour groups to a panda breeding preserve where we perform a few days of volunteering.  My tour group members work alongside the panda keepers as the keepers go about their daily chores of caring for several pandas.  Cleaning cages, feeding and monitoring activity of the pandas in their care are the regular daily tasks.


 
Feeding and clean up always involves taking out the bamboo from the day before and bringing another 50 pounds of fresh bamboo.  The bamboo is trucked in fresh daily because pandas are great connoisseurs of bamboo.  If bamboo is not fresh, the pandas will not eat it.  If it is too dry they will not eat it.  If it is too old when cut, they will not eat it.  They can be quite fussy about their bamboo and the preserve staff has learned to accommodate this finicky diet.

There was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when uneaten; one or two day old bamboo was not removed from the panda enclosures.  Bamboo was and is expensive to truck in to the panda preserves daily.  The old drying bamboo was left in the panda enclosures for several days if uneaten, for the pandas to eat or not.  Panda keepers just thought that pandas would only eat one or two varieties of bamboo.  The world thought that pandas were just too finicky about their diet.

We know better now.  Pandas will eat any of some 35 varieties of bamboo.  But it must be fresh, like homemade bread is best eaten fresh from the oven.  Old bamboo just won’t do for these bamboo gourmands. 

Around the panda preserves at Wolong and Bifengxia are groves of bamboo. These are grown for landscaping and decorative purposes and are not put there to be used as panda food.  The bamboo for pandas is purchased from local farmers who are contracted to grow and harvest fresh bamboo.
But this contracted bamboo comes to the preserves a day after cutting, perhaps two days after being cut.  The pandas recognize this difference between fresh bamboo they harvest as they eat, but they learn to accept this harvested bamboo, which is kept covered and moist until it arrives in the morning for delivery by the panda keepers to the panda enclosures. 

 
Several times I helped panda keepers sneak into these ornamental bamboo groves to illicitly harvest tasty, moist fresh young bamboo for some special panda.  This might be some panda who was not eating well or who was recovering from one of the frequent stomach disorders the captive pandas suffer.

While my friend the panda keeper would casually slip into the grove of 6 foot or 7 foot high bamboo, her knife hidden in her jacket, I would play lookout.  Then quickly as possible the panda keeper would harvest a dozen 4 foot long fresh young bamboo stalks and we would quick walk back to the panda enclosure. The grateful panda would always chow down on that illicit bamboo like it was 20 year old bourbon during prohibition.

Once given to the panda the evidence would disappear in 15 minutes.  This illicit cutting of the bamboo was considered a minor infraction of the work rules. Something akin to a parking meter violation vs. the more serious crime of drunk driving. 

The punishment for this illicit cutting of decorative bamboo would have been for the panda keeper to take on some extra work duty.  Work such as working a double day and then night shift during the panda mating season.  Or perhaps taking over the work of a sick or vacationing panda keeper while also continuing the care of her own 2 or 3 pandas.

What I have to wonder right now, is if as a self-confessed bamboo thief, when I go for my next visit to Bifengxia in October will I be penalized and given double panda poop scooping duty?

Photo below: The man responsible for catching bamboo thieves. . . . .

 

Mr. Han, my good friend and the head panda keeper responsible for all of the panda keepers at Wolong until 2008. He has had the same and added responsibility at Bifengxia since the 2008 earthquake.

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