Vanessa's Journal

Feb. 26

Today I hiked down the mountain to do a few errands. It was good to get caught up with some friends in town who had been away for the Chinese New Year holiday and get some of the bills paid before my upcoming departure. Despite the fact that it had snowed buckets up at the field station last night, it was a beautiful sunny day down in town. 

Feb. 27

I got caught up with some e-mail and then hiked back up the mountain today. I was again greeted warmly by the field team members, who had nothing of note to report from their trap checking. I also carried a bunch of thermometers up the mountain that were bought by a colleague of mine. We are hoping to set them up in various locations around Wuyipeng and obtain some consistent and hopefully long-term temperature data. It seems that the behavior of giant pandas and the other animals up here is driven in part by climate. However, we do not understand the details of these dynamics, mainly due to lack of temperature data. Hopefully, my research group will be able to start to fill this gap and learn something new about our mysterious friends the giant pandas.