- Not everyone knows that there are two kinds of pandas. One is the red panda and the other is the giant panda. The best known kind, loved by everyone is the beautiful black-and-white giant panda. The smaller red panda is quite common, but giant pandas are now very rare. Giant pandas are the national animal of China. They are also the emblem of the World Wildlife Fund, an organization that gives money to projects to save rare animals and plants.
- Giant panda used to live in many parts of China. A few lived in the neighboring country of Burma. Scientists guess that only about one thousand giant pandas are now left. They live only in one area of China. Most pandas are found in the province of Sichuan in southwest China, on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The giant pandas live deep in the mountainous bamboo forests.
- Giant pandas were originally meat-eating animals, or carnivores. Pandas are very gentle animals and are not suited to hunting other animals for food. Over the years they have changed their eating habits. They began to eat a bushy plant called bamboo instead. But giant pandas’ bodies, which are made for eating meat, cannot digest the bushy plant properly. Because of this, less than one-fifth of the pandas’ food intake gives them any nourishment. They have to eat enormous amounts of bamboo to get the vitamins they need.
- Giant pandas spend twelve to fourteen hours a day feeding. They can eat over 25 pounds of bamboo shoots and stems daily. Pandas need vast areas of bamboo forest to provide enough food for them. But the forests are being taken over by farmers, who need the space to grow food for China’s many people. Although trees are being cut for good reason – to make paper and clear the land for farming – it destroys the only places where pandas can live.
- There are many varieties of bamboo, but giant pandas in the wild only like to eat three kinds. These are called “walking stick” bamboo, “umbrella” bamboo, and “cold arrow” bamboo. Every few years, these bamboos flower, produce seeds, and then die. It takes many years for the new seed to grow into bamboo big enough for the giant pandas to eat. The “cold arrow” bamboo takes twenty years to grow back.
- Giant pandas rarely leave their home territories which are about five square miles. When the bamboo there flowers and dies, the pandas never think about moving to another area to find food. They stay where they are and starve to death. The worst disaster happened in the spring of 1976, when the bamboo flowered and died in parts of China. More than 140 giant pandas died of starvation.