China is working hard to protect its national symbol, the panda, from extinction, writes Clifford Coonan in the Sichuan province.
Energetically scrambling along the branches of a tree or snapping bamboo shoots, pawing their playmates or watching with curious black eyes while sprawled across a rock, giant pandas are busy creatures, full of surprises. And seriously cute. Rolling around, joking with each other as they chew on their bamboo stalks, at times they look like children wearing panda suits, so human are their spontaneous displays of affection and mischief with each other.
They are generally shy of people, but I was able to sit beside one cheerful panda and feed her an apple at the Wolong Nature Reserve in south-west China's Sichuan province, which is leading the drive to keep pandas from dying out completely.
The traditional image of the panda is of an appealing, but sluggish and pampered, giant teddy bear lumbering its way into extinction by refusing to breed or change its diet. A dumb animal.
It is true that the chubby bears enjoy a nap - there are plenty of pandas slouched around after lunch - but they are more spry than you'd think. There is some energetic panda-play going on in some of the compounds at Wolong.
There are only 1,590 pandas in the wild and 180 in China's five major breeding facilities, which makes them one of the world's most endangered species.The good news is that the giant panda is making a comeback, say the people at Wolong, home to the world's largest panda population, as well as a centre for research into these elusive and reclusive creatures.
"The fact that there are 180 pandas in captivity now is largely due to our success in resolving the problems with mating. We hope to have 300 before too long," says Prof Zhang Hemin, director of the China Conservation and Research Centre at Wolong.
"Each year we want to put 20 or 30 back into the wild to try and improve the DNA. If we want to have a self-sustaining panda population, we need a bigger pool of individuals, because we need a relatively high genetic diversity," he says.
The panda is to China what the shamrock is to Ireland - a national emblem and good luck to boot. In Chinese, they are called da xiong mao, which means "big bear cat". Recently we have seen the return of panda diplomacy, where Beijing plans to offer a pair of pandas as a gift to Taiwan, which it views as a renegade province, as a way of improving relations. And a panda was one of the five mascots chosen for the Olympic Games in Beijing in three years' time. So keeping the animal from dying out is in the national interest.
This year there has been a record number of giant panda births in captivity as Chinese scientists use better artificial insemination techniques. In all, 25 giant pandas were born and survived in captivity around the world during this summer's birthing season, most of them in China, but also a few in other countries such as Japan and the US. A lot of the success stems from a better understanding of how pandas live and mate.
"As a result of our research over time, the artificial insemination rate and baby survival rate have been dramatically enhanced," says Zhang, clearly proud of his centre's success.
The facility was set up in 1983, when 10 pandas were rescued from near-death and researchers began to look for ways to improve pandas' ability to breed.
ON PAPER, PANDAS look like their own worst enemies; it sometimes seems they are genetically programmed to become extinct. Pandas have an extremely slow reproductive rate. They spend most of the year on their own, except during a three-month mating season which begins in March each year. The boy pandas are no Casanovas, suffering from a chronic lack of sex drive - more than 60 per cent of male pandas in captivity show no sexual desire at all, and only a tenth of them will mate naturally.
The female is fertile for just a few days each year, during which time she emits a distinctive sound and her sexual organs turn red, then white. The pregnancy lasts around 160 days. And the girl pandas like to play hard-to-get.
Just like everyone else in China, pandas follow a kind of one-child policy. Female pandas generally give birth to just one cub, which weighs about as much as an apple when it is born. When two cubs are born, the mother will often abandon one or crush the cub in its sleep as she is not equipped to care for two.
A major advance in helping the panda breeding programme along came in 1980, when scientists learned how to freeze panda sperm in liquid hydrogen, and since then the programme has gone in steps. The methods used to get pandas making more pandas are at times funny, but they seem to be working. Like the sex education videos, which wags like to call "panda porn". The centre has been giving them sex education classes as they enter adulthood - showing them videos of other pandas mating in an attempt to arouse their instincts. The programme has been reasonably successful. Some researchers say the pandas were glued to the screen and there was a small increase in the number of births.
"Since the centre was established, it has seen 61 embryos and 90 baby giant pandas, of which 77 survived. The baby giant panda survival rate at Wolong has now been maintained at 100 per cent for five consecutive years," says Zhang.
Then there is the diet issue - what they do eat they can't digest as they have a very inefficient digestive system. Pandas are officially categorised as carnivores, but 99 per cent of their diet is not meat. But, vegetarians or not, pandas put away vast amounts of food - up to an average of 25kg a day each - and bamboo makes up around 95 per cent of their diet. True gourmands, they spend nearly 12 hours a day eating bamboo shoots, leaves and stems.
In bamboo, of which there are 300 varieties in China, the panda has chosen a troublesome staple. Bamboo will flower and then die off roughly about every 20 to 40 years, at which point the pandas have to move on to fresh pastures. Not an easy task, as nature gives way in the rush to industrialise China and pandas can starve while trying to locate new bamboo area.
DESPITE THE PANDA'S reproductive and digestive shortfalls, human beings are the main factor behind the depletion of the giant panda population and man is the panda's only predator. China needs natural resources to fuel its booming economic growth, which has led to logging and clearing of land for agricultural uses in bamboo-growing areas.
Hunting and poaching were traditional problems for the panda, though they are now forbidden by law and the ban is strictly enforced. The Chinese government has set up many nature reserves in south-western China to protect the beasts, and one of the reasons for the recent growth in the population is that the state has turned large parts of the panda's habitat into reserves where logging, hunting and farming are forbidden. There are also plans afoot to expand programmes of "bamboo corridors", strips of undisturbed land through which pandas can comfortably travel from mountain to mountain.
And it could be that this is paying off, though most conservationists say the jury is still out on the panda's future. A survey last year by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the state forestry administration - the most comprehensive of its kind yet - showed that the number of giant pandas living in the wild has risen by more than 40 per cent to 1,590 since efforts to protect them started to work, and up from 1,110 in the 1980s and around 1,000 in the 1970s.
"Because of its lovable and cuddly image, the giant panda is very popular in China and abroad. I'm optimistic about the panda's future," says Zhang. "The panda population here is growing very fast. We're confident the panda will exist forever," he added.
On the drive from Sichuan's capital Chengdu out to Wolong, a bone-shaking three-hour drive along a narrow road which looks down hundreds of metres to the river below, you can see some of the massive environmental changes that are destroying the panda's natural habitat.
The route takes you past some factories along the river, reminiscent of the Victorian dark satanic mills that Charles Dickens wrote about, huge grey concrete cement factories and chemical plants. The sky begins to clear up as Wolong approaches and by the time you've reached the park it is like being in a different country. Hawks circle in the sky, golden monkeys jump up and down as the car passes, a clear river splashes over shining rocks. It's a beautiful scene.
You see a panda, a flash of black and white in the green foliage. But then the cuddly black-and-white creature is gone again. Let's hope not gone for good.