Vanessa's Journal

Jan. 28

Today I decided to get some perspective on our trapping progress (or lack thereof) by revisiting the trapping data on the pandas that were collared here in a project in the 1980s.  This was a project conducted by a number of people, including George Schaller from the World Wildlife Fund, Jinchu Hu of Nanchong Normal College in Sichuan, Wenshi Pan from Beijing University, and Jing Zhu from Academia Sinica, Beijing. They document their project in English in a book called “The Giant Pandas of Wolong”. This is widely considered the “panda bible” and I highly recommend it to anyone interested.

They had two trapping seasons, one from March-April 1981 and one from December 1981-February 1982.  They used eight traps, five were wooden and three were metal.  Some of these traps were in the same locations that we have ours.  They also used some foot snares in the first trapping season but phased those out later.  During their first trapping season, they caught three pandas on these dates: March 10, 1981, March 13, 1981, and April 19, 1981.  During the second trapping season, they caught three pandas on these dates: December 22, 1981, January 11, 1982, and January 21, 1982.  They then trapped a seventh animal in the following December 1982, which was not part of an official trapping season.  My guess is that they detected an animal in a location where they thought they could trap it by opening up a cage for a short time. 

This does not include the subsequent captures where they recaptured the same animal a year later and changed the collar battery.  Many of the animals went back in traps again, some multiple times.  One single animal went into a trap three times in one week!  I think what happened there is that this panda was very thin and in bad shape, so meat was very inviting.  Overall, the total number of trapping events was 18.  Of course, the number of pandas in their study area at that time was also 18. 

It doesn’t seem like snowfall was a big factor in their trapping, contrary to what I had thought.  The two winters that they trapped were actually “light snowfall” winters, compared to other years.  Looking at their data, it seems like during the months in which they successfully trapped, there wasn’t significantly more snow than we are having right now.  In addition, it seems like our current temperature is similar to their January temperature (average of about 2 to -8 degrees Celsius), although our November/December temperature was definitely much warmer than theirs. 

Our biggest enemy seems to be the fact that for whatever reason, we do not have nearly as many as 18 pandas in the area. I’m not sure how many there are because we are holding off on doing extensive feces searches due to concerns of human disturbance, but I know we are not anywhere near 18.  So we are just hoping for the best and hoping that the few that are in the area will take our bait.

I enjoyed my perusal of the book so much that I decided to re-read it in its entirety. I got through the first 90 pages or so today. It’s amazing how much you can read if it’s written in your first language. I get something different out if this book every time I read it, so it has been rewarding. 

Meanwhile, we are having a blizzard outside! It started at about 5 pm and is going strong hours later…definitely the most snow we have had in one day so far! Lao Fan is joking with me about my bad luck, because I am set to go check our 10 traps tomorrow.  It should be a fun hike!