Eleven rare pandas found in China's wild
Date: 22-Apr-03
Country: CHINA
Six pandas - five adults and one cub - were found in the Foping nature reserve in the northwestern province of Shaanxi last month, with the males fighting among themselves to mate with the female, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Five more pandas were found nearby the next day, it added.
The discovery was highly unusual since the panda is an elusive creature and scientists have often had to depend on paw tracks and excrement to tally the panda population.
"Ordinary people think the giant panda is a 'dead-end' species with declining productivity, which is a misunderstanding," said Yu Changqing, coordinator for the Giant Panda Programme of the World Wildlife Fund.
"Pandas in the wild are reproducing very normally," Yu said.
Yu estimated there were about 1,500 wild pandas, with over half of them living in foggy, mountainous nature reserves in southwestern China.
Logging has been the biggest threat to the endangered black-and-white panda, destroying its natural habit of forests with undergrowth of bamboo, its staple food.
China imposed a logging ban in panda-inhabited areas in 1998, in a bid to help save an animal cherished as a national treasure and a worldwide symbol of conservation.
"Natural conditions for pandas are much, much better," Yu said of the recent changes.
But poaching remains a threat. Poaching pandas is rare - illegal hunters are subject to prison terms of more than 10 years - but traps set for other animals such as deer and bears have accidentally killed pandas, Yu said.
People living in nature reserves, searching for new sources of income after logging and farming were banned, had begun building roads to attract tourists, posing new threats to the animal.
China has also set up two breeding centres that aim to reintroduce captive pandas into the wild. But all the 200 pandas sent to the wild have either fallen sick or been injured in the wild, forcing them back into captivity.
