Vanessa's Journal

Jan. 19

On the Wuyipeng life front, we are battling water shortages.  The pipe that gives us water has gone through various degrees of freezing over in recent days.  Today I think we may have reached a breaking point. We may be close to the dreaded ‘point of no return’, at which time we will be carrying water in buckets from a water source that is a 10-15 minute walk away. I’m not sure if we are there yet, but I will consult with our water expert Lao Wang. We may be entering the ‘water rationing’ phase.  I’m afraid of doing laundry if it means somebody can’t wash their face at night, but perhaps it is not that bad yet. I’m glad I took a shower semi-recently.  It’s important to keep things in perspective, as I spent three months in Kenya back in 2003 and ‘water shortage’ over there means no water for miles and potentially dying of thirst, so really we are just used to being spoiled.

Today I worked more on my reading of the third panda survey chapter on disturbance to the panda habitat. Some common current human disturbances include grazing, herb collection, and direct cutting of bamboo. The most surprising to me was the high frequency of grazing in the panda habitat. They found it in more than 10 percent of sampling areas and it was often current and significant in its impact. 

Some of the latest ‘up and coming’ disturbances include tourism and mining.  It appears that the scars from the excessive timber harvesting of the 1900s are still apparent in the habitat.  The good thing is that the surveyors rarely found evidence of current timber harvesting, but you cannot just replace 50-year-old trees and have everything go back to normal.  Poaching still happens.  They only found evidence of it in about 3 percent of areas, but they said that it can be difficult to detect and thus this is likely an underestimate.

I like this chapter because it breaks down the different types of disturbance and discusses the different characteristics of a disturbance such as its severity of impact and frequency of occurrence.  It’s difficult I think to say which is the ‘worst one’ because every type of human disturbance works in a different way - some are very subtle but leave long-lasting impacts and others are massive in spatial scale but short-lived. This is definitely an important issue to look at in detail for conservation and management of the species. 

Lao Fan announced at dinner that he had a dream last night and in it, God told him “Be patient, the panda will come to your cage after some days.”  He now has a newfound optimism that I think has spread to the rest of us.  We shall see.