Panda Love

Hello everyone. Hope you are enjoying the weekend. Though I have been upvoting on a daily basis, I myself have not posted anything in about a week, so I thought that I would make up for it by sharing with you some giant Panda Love!

A few months ago I had the opportunity to visit the Toronto Zoo. I was motivated to check out the giant pandas which had been there for the past 5 years, but were scheduled to be transferred to the Calgary Zoo.

In March 2013, Da Mao (male panda) and Er Shun (female panda) arrived at the Toronto zoo as part of a ten year partnership between China, Toronto and Calgary. This collaboration was created out of a Global Giant Panda Conservation Breeding Program. As a result, in October 2015 history was made with the first baby panda cubs ever to be born in Canada.

It is rare that twin pandas are born and it is even more rare for both to survive. In the wild, the mother panda only has enough resources to care for one of the two and will neglect the one she considers weaker where it will inevitably die. Thanks to innovative methods, only made possible by having all 3 pandas in captivity, both baby cubs were able to live on and as you can see below are doing well...

No French kissing here, just Jia Yueyue (sister) and Jia Panpan (brother) partaking in a tug of war with their teeth.

"You want some of this? Go ahead eat it!"

Jia Panpan was born 13 minutes before his sister . Figuring out their gender was not an easy undertaking. Swabs of DNA from their mouths had to be taken and sent to a forensic lab before they could be identified and named which was through an online naming competition.

"I was just kidding. Give it back to me!"

A panda has five fingers and an enlarged wrist bone which acts as a thumb to grip the bamboo that makes up for 99 percent of their diet.

Meanwhile, Er Shun (mama bear) seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

While any bed will do for Da Mao (papa bear).

"It's just a leather ribbon little sister. You crack me up."

The good news is that between 2013 and 2018 as a result of the Global Giant Panda Conservation Breeding Program the giant panda was downgraded from "endangered" to "vulnerable" by the (IUCN) International Union for Conservation of Nature.

If you are in the Calgary area I recommend you check out this family of four at the Calgary Zoo. I also recommend you bring a good camera. My only regret is that I somehow left my camera bag in another car and had to make do with an old 6 megapixel point and shoot borrowed from a friend which required some extra work editing the shots.

I hope this put a smile on your face. If so, then I did my good deed for the day. Cheers!