Vanessa's Journal

Feb. 5

Today I expected an uneventful hike on our last day up here before the Chinese New Year, but it was not to be. We caught a red panda again in the same Jianpengzi trap. In fact, I’m thinking it is the same animal that we caught exactly one week ago.  It probably has a visit to the trap penciled into its mental schedule for every Tuesday. This time it was in the trap for longer, as we are thinking it arrived the night before. But in my mind, it must be warm in that little wooden log cabin at night. It definitely got the chance to eat more meat in there this time.  Now I know what the 1980s trapping team meant when they said that animals would enter traps repeatedly. That meat must be enticing. 

When we opened the cage to let it go, it again hesitated in its escape due to our presence. However, after a few moments, it darted out and made a beeline for the bamboo thicket in the same direction as last time.  Something tells me it will be back weekly. Lao Yang’s reaction to the incident was funny to me because he was visibly frustrated and kept saying “Red panda, we don’t want you!” I think he feels like someone upstairs is teasing us with the close relatives of our target animal, the giant panda. 

We kept on hiking after that and caught sight of a flurry of activity at another Jianpengzi trap where there was an entire community of birds and squirrels feasting on our meat.  It was like they were having their own Chinese New Year party. I’ve also come to doubt the inadequacy of our metal traps because the metal trap at Yaopengzi has become the equivalent of Grand Central Station for the local carnivores. The number of little footprints inside the cage is unbelievable: there is some leopard cat, yellow throated marten and even red panda. The giant panda is still elusive, however.

Later on at Erdaoping, we ran into the golden monkeys, like I had hoped. For whatever reason, this time they were in a spot where it was much easier to get glimpses of them. I loved watching them jump from branch to branch and make their unique calls. Later when I checked the camera, I found that Lao Yang had taken some absolutely mesmerizing images of what looks to be the head male monkey of the troop. I didn’t spot him in person because I was too busy watching some of the young ones in their playful jaunts among the trees. But this male was just unbelievable in his size and apparent strength. The intensity in his face was almost haunting. I really felt touched by the rarity of their presence and hope that they can be protected in places that we like to label as “giant panda habitat.”

Towards the end of the day, I came across a small dead vole on the trail.  Lao Yang said that it had been killed by a yellow-throated marten. I think one day we should try to make a giant food web to figure out who is eating who up here, as the cast of characters is expanding. However, for whatever reason, this vole was not even eaten. Lao Yang said the yellow throated marten must have just been hunting for fun. Who knows, maybe it is leaving it there for a snack later on. 

To top off a day that was filled with random animal encounters, I heard a strangely loud animal call while hiking back to Wuyipeng. I asked Lao Yang what it was and he said that he was sure it was a domestic dog.  We never saw it, as it sounded like it was in the woods towards the direction of Fangzipeng.  Later on, as we hiked down the mountain, we indeed saw fresh footprints of what looked like a dog coming up to Wuyipeng. That’s a long way to go wandering from one’s home. It must not have been treated very well by its family.  Lao Yang concluded that it had escaped and decided to try and make it on its own in the wild. There should be plenty of small rodents running around up here to keep it occupied. 

So after that whirlwind hike, we went down the mountain for the holiday.  When I got down, I found a Chinese Happy New Year card from my research lab members back at MSU waiting for me. It was very thoughtful. Thanks all! I stayed at Lao Wang’s house that night and had a lot of fun. We had a huge dinner of 10 people with a lot of food and I got to meet a lot of his family members that I had not met before. By the next day, he had four of his five kids there, along with their spouses and four grandkids. The first night, I bonded with his daughter’s cat while we sat around the fire they use to keep everyone warm in winter. It was precious time for me because I rarely get to see my own pets, as they live with my parents in Connecticut.  This cat was 3 years old and was so precious. The cats here are not pampered. They are working farm animals in the sense that they are supposed to catch all of the rats and mice.  This one seemed like she had about three years of dirt piled up on her and also had a chunk of her ear missing, likely during a fight with some of the bigger cats around. Some of the whiskers on her face had been singed off by sitting too close to the fire one too many times. I don’t think people pet her very much and I soon found out why, as after she had been cuddling on my lap for a short time and nuzzling her face in my hands, it looked like I had stuck my hands in a giant bowl of charcoal. But as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She is my new precious friend.

After dinner, I bonded with another member of the Wang family, Lao Wang’s 8-year-old grandson. The best way to describe him is to say that he is constantly smiling. He invited me to play cars with him. His “cars” consisted of branches from the pile of firewood coupled with round plastic container tops. He put the plastic tops on the end of the branches and then flung them either up into the air or across the room. He had two main cars, the big one was best for its short distance spinning capacity and its loudness and the small one was best for long distance propulsion. His definition of car was broad to say the least. He has a limitless imagination. And he never seemed to get bored. We must have played cars for over an hour. I wasn’t bored either, as I was busy getting lessons from him on the proper car propelling techniques. It is an amazing learning experience to spend time with him because I think he is likely legally blind. I’m not sure how much he can and cannot see, but it’s easy to forget about it when he doesn’t act like he has a disability and no one in his family treats him like he has a disability. It seems inappropriate to even use the word disability, as his other senses are much more highly developed than my own. When he propelled his cars, he had an unbelievable ability to follow the sound of where they went. He would also ask me to describe to him the shape of their trajectory and how high they flew. He seemed to enjoy hearing my descriptions, as that was part of the fun.