Peek-a-Boo Panda
Vanessa Hull, a 25-year-old Ph.D. candidate, walks the snowy, remote mountains of western China's Sichuan Province, which is also the heart of panda country. She's hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild, giant pandas using advanced global positioning systems.
Hull and her team are helping China's efforts to reintroduce pandas into the wild. For the past dozen years, American and Chinese research teams have collaborated to study the pandas in Wolong. Established in 1963, the reserve covers almost 500 acres and hosts more than 4,000 plant and animal species. Thanks to successful captive breeding programs, in 2003, the China Center for Research and Conservation of the Giant Panda in the Wolong Nature Reserve launched a program to reintroduce captive pandas into the wild.
Along with her research gear, the Michigan State University graduate student lugs a small digital video camera and a laptop computer to transmit journal entries to a Web site the university has set up to give the public a peak at a day in the life of a panda researcher.
The high-mountain reserve is a three-hour drive from the city of Chengdu, and although Hull has visited the area before, this is her first winter studying the elusive animals there. Her web log reads:
Dec. 2. [I] notice that snow caps the higher mountains. Wei says the first snowfall is last night and he thinks it is a good omen.
Giant pandas are the darlings of their native China and much of the world. But on a walk through panda habitat the endangered bears are invisible. Only an estimated 1,600 live in the wild.
Even in reserves, pandas share their homes with people locked in their own struggle to survive. About 5,000 people life in the reserve, where logging and farming have wiped out acres of panda-friendly terrain. Ironically, China's efforts to save the goggled animals have made the nature reserves an irresistible tourist attraction—panda fans and ecotourists flock like groupies.
The home base in Wuyipeng lies in the reserve's bamboo jungle about an hour-and-a-half hike up the switchbacks. The remote research station Hull and her two Chinese research assistants will call home for the next few months has sheltered scores of panda researchers since it was established in the 1980s. In 2001, the station was refurbished and now has electricity, a bathroom, a new phone line and a TV.
Dec. 5. I always say that I can feel a special energy on the hike and when we arrive up at Wuyipeng because it is perhaps the most sacred place for giant panda research.
The center has been working to release captive-raised adult pandas by starting them out in large enclosures to monitor how they do in areas similar to the wild. The study gives scientists information about the kind of habitat pandas need to survive in the wild.
Hull is among the first to obtain permits to trap giant pandas and fit them with safe GPS collars. She and the team will then map where the elusive creatures' travel, indicating which areas they like best.
"The benefit of using a GPS collar," Hull says, "is you know exactly where the pandas are. Then we can go to that location and get more information about it that might tell us why the panda is there and not at some other location. If we know what kind of habitat pandas like, then we know what kind of habitat to conserve or restore."
But first, they must catch the animals. For that, the team uses seven roomy cages sprinkled around the reserve. Four are metal and have been sitting open and baited, but not set, throughout the reserve since summer to get the pandas used to them. Chunks of goat serve as bait. Even though pandas are famous for their bamboo diet, it's more a matter of availability than taste. Pandas are classified as carnivores.
Dec. 11. We ate and then got ourselves ready to go out in the field to set our first trap. Lao Yang and Lao Fan showed me the goat that they had slaughtered for the bait in the traps while I was in Chengdu buying my computer. They decided that the first cage would contain the goat's head.
It takes three-and-a-half hours to hike the 5-mile route to check all the cages, which must be done every day.
Dec. 8. [My coworkers] strongly believe that in order for this project to be successful, we have to pray to the gods for their blessing and for them to do their part to coax the pandas into the cages. They are so insistent on it that I get the feeling they will all boycott field work unless we do this, so off to the temple we go.
By the middle of December, all the traps were baited. Hull checked and rechecked the GPS collars at the station to make sure they were properly built and functioning. Once an animal is trapped she'll immediately use a cell phone to contact veterinarians who are on call. The bear will be measured, weighed and have its general health assessed. Then it will be collared.
A month into the expedition, Hull and her team still had not trapped a giant panda. Squirrels had learned to take the bait and run, and other animals left signs they had visited the area. As daily checks turned up no research subjects, Hull went about the more-mundane tasks of field work: laundry, report writing, translating manuscripts and visits to the Internet facility down the mountain. But with little more than two months left of her visit, Hull began to consider adjusting her research plan.
The team chose where to set the traps based on where the animals spent last year's winter, which was colder and snowier than this one. Last year, 12 of the bears moved into Wuyipeng from nearby Hero Valley in late December. This year has not been so lucky, and Hull was beginning to doubt not only the location of the traps, but the sit-and-wait strategy the team was implementing.
But building traps where bears exist is noisy and could ruin any chance of trapping one, much less four. They decided to send two team members into the valley to look for evidence the bears were still there.
Dec. 19.If my team does not find evidence of pandas in the areas where we thought they would be, we will be changing our strategy by setting up four new traps near an area called Fangzipeng, which is on the other side of Wuyipeng entirely. During my team's jaunt in Hero Valley, I will be up at Wuyipeng checking traps with Lao Wang as usual.
The survey of Hero Valley was discouraging. They found evidence of only two pandas, and one was too far away to likely wander into the trapping area. So, with the help of reserve officials, Hull began the complicated task of acquiring new traps to set in an area north of Wuyipeng. Moving the heavy and cumbersome wood and metal cages they were using would be too disruptive and difficult.
Meanwhile, the team experimented with ways to lure the animals with bait and continued the daily cage-checking routine.
Dec. 31. By the time we got up close to the first cage at Jianpengzi, I had gone into my usual daydreaming mode. Suddenly, Lao Fan, who was in front of me, turned and said matter-of-factly, "The panda has come." He pointed to the ground where there was fresh giant panda feces right on the trail, not but 70 meters from the cage. We both looked at each other with wide eyes, as if to say "We aren't alone up here." Lao Fan told me that he guessed that the panda had been there last night.
Hopes that Fangzipeng would prove fruitful were soon dashed. The area seemed ideal because it is flat and has ample water and bamboo. Because they have short, carnivorous digestive tracts, pandas digest only about 20 percent of the bamboo they eat, which doesn't produce enough energy for traveling steep slopes. Evidence from past years—old feces and three large den trees pandas had carved out to protect their newborns—indicated the area had once been home to the animals.
But not this year. Even in January at an elevation of 9,000 feet, the sun beat down on the reserve like it was summer. "It's all the more obvious that trapping at Fangzipeng now is a waste of time," Hull said.
As she resorts to a newly published 300-page giant panda census written completely in Chinese, Hull's strategy for catching pandas now changes daily. That's the way field work is. Still, she trudges down the mountain to send her video files and diary updates by Internet to MSU's Web team. The site includes video clips and panda pictures from previous trips, as well as news releases about scientific publications. There's also a chance to e-mail questions to the research team.
Readers can visit the site at www.special.newsroom.msu.edu/panda.
The research is supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
—Leslie Fink, NSF
This report is provided by the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, in partnership with U.S. News and World Report.
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