An American Panda

Posted on August 27, 2002 in Zoos

Molly wasn’t as keen on seeing the pandas as Jodie and the rest of the family were. She’d been to China where they keep them lined up like bars of soap on the supermarket shelves.

The panda junk toy market, I gathered from her comments as we passed the souvenir stand, was every bit as bad as here in the United States. Molly told us that she’d seen umbrellas with the trademark black eyes and a pair of ears sticking out of the top.

Perhaps consumerism had already saturated her. But I’ve seen pandas before,” she told her mother as we lingered in line.

“Not this close,” Jodie said.

“We got close,” Molly insisted.

“Not this many.”

“They had lots of them.” It was China, home of the panda, after all.

Jodie was amused when I reported that scientists in China tried to boost the interest of male pandas by showing them video tapes of other pandas mating. The alliterative “panda porn” suggested itself immediately to Jodie and she repeated it for the girls with a chuckle while John explained to Lynn why accounting was in trouble these days.

Jodie reaffirmed that she was waiting in this line for Molly. Molly remained uninterested and kept coming up with rebuttals. I felt a little sorry for Jodie, so I said “Hua Mei is the only panda in the world to be born in America.” Jodie saw where I was going with this.

“Yes,” she stated with mock gravity. “This is an American panda. You’ve never seen an American panda before.”

Molly had nothing to counter that. Jodie told us about how, two years ago, she’d visited the National Zoo. She followed the signs and discovered the enclosures empty. The pandas were off display, the victims of decrepitude and mortality: Lynn said that she’d heard they were dead.

Our previous experience with Hua Mei and her parents suggested that the experience of seeing these living pandas might not be much more excited. The last time I’d see the mother, she’d been flopped out on the dirt, baring her pink cauliflower butt for all the world to see. The pandas often liked to snooze behind the foilage while the docent read a script about panda survival in the modern world. I suspected they did it to add drama to a boring scene.

The docent kept her peace. Folks in the line whispered the news they’d gleaned from the update boards: Hua Mei turned two on August 21. She and her father were going back to China. A new male was being sent over to ensure genetic diversity. The female might be pregnant.

As the line snaked into the viewing area, people stopped talking. They pointed digital cameras and camcorders towards a corner we could not see from the gate. I noticed that the arms of the camera people moved. We advanced a few more steps. Then we saw Hua Mei.

She did circles around her massive terrarium. Now and then she stopped to scratch herself against a log. Or she grabbed a bit of bamboo as a snack. Sometimes she walked back to the door through which the zookeeper had shoved her earlier in the morning. She pushed against it and found it locked. Lynn, Jodie, the girls, and John spoke in whispers. They pointed at the oversized raccoon. I smiled and took several pictures. My group moved on, abruptly. I took the hint and followed them to the next pen, where Jodie thought she could see the father’s ear sticking out from behind a bush.

We stopped for a moment to view the photo mural chronicling Hua Mei’s birth and first two years of growth. I teased that in the first photo they’d substituted a large white rat for the baby laying next to her mother. Everyone laughed and we went off for lunch.