Vanessa's Journal

Jan. 16

Well folks, we are about at the half-way point of the trip.  I’m not exactly sure when I’m leaving, but the panda mating season starts in March and we cannot trap then because there is a chance that the females could be pregnant.  Anesthetizing a female in order to put a collar on her could harm or kill an infant developing in the womb, so March is sort of our stopping point until next winter.  Getting to the half-way point is rather humbling because I still have four GPS collars sitting in my room and they are not on animals yet. 

However, at this half-way point I have hope because we have gotten a huge amount of snow in just the last two days. To my field assistants who know this area like their own backyards, it is a sign that more pandas are coming. We can only hope for the best. Today three goats came up the mountain and were sacrificed for our trapping purposes, so tomorrow there will be a whole lot of new meat going up on the mountain. Other than that, we are all just doing our best to stay warm and keep putting one foot in front of the other each day. 

Today I finished Chapter 2 of my third panda census book. It was a good read.  The chapter outlined the distribution of wild pandas and their habitat throughout their range and the estimated population size. 

What I most appreciated from the text was how it did not shy away from discussing the extent of fragmentation of the giant panda habitat and population.  For those of us who work with pandas, we always say that the habitat is highly fragmented. But it is one thing to say it and another thing to break down each section of the habitat and analyze the distance between patches and what separates one group of pandas from another. 

The culprits are the usual human-related factors that we see cropping up all over the world -- highways, railroads, cities, farmland, and timber harvesting, to name a few. It is scary to look in depth at the map of the current distribution of wild giant pandas and see these small little islands of pandas that are surrounded by a sea of cities. To a wildlife biologist, this is not good because it means that there are isolated groups of animals who are all potentially inbreeding with one another and are at serious risk of being wiped out if some sort of natural disaster or local habitat perturbation occurs. 

We still have a long way to go, even with an animal that is considered a national treasure in China.  We still have an estimated less than 50 percent of the habitat protected by reserves, which in my opinion is too low.  But it’s hopeful to me that people invested a great deal into this national panda survey so that we hopefully have some better direction for the future.