how I dressed in a giant fluffy panda suit to convince the world's most pampered infant that I was one of the fam

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BAMBOOZLED!... or how I dressed in a giant fluffy panda suit to convince the world's most pampered infant that I was one of the family

Maybe it was his animal instinct telling him those weird-looking pandas were coming to grab him again.

Or maybe he had an unusually well-developed sense of humour and thought it amusing to keep six of us standing around in panda suits on an icy Chinese mountainside.

Either way, the baby giant panda seemed intent on making mischief.

Before we had even set foot in his enclosure, he gave his mother the slip and scrambled 30ft up into the branches of a tree. There he sat, perched defiantly, with no intention of coming back down to earth.

In a hidden cabin nearby with a wall of TV monitors positioned to capture every move of the baby panda and his mother Cao Cao, I was left scratching and fidgeting with a vet and a team of keepers, all unconvincingly disguised as adult pandas – the type that happen to walk on two legs and carry clipboards, medical bags and cameras – on standby to give the surly infant a medical check-up.

It was clearly going to be a long and uncomfortable wait.

Like millions of others, I had been captivated by the photographs published around the world last month of keepers in comical panda suits cradling the baby giant panda to prepare him for the wild by rearing him without him ever seeing a human.

The shots – taken by one of the centre’s own photographers – showed the panda, then four months old, being carried and weighed by staff in panda suits specially made to try to ensure that the infant does not grow accustomed to the sight and touch of people. One day, it could save him from poachers.

Now, on a snowy January morning in the mountains of South-West China, I had been offered the chance to be the first foreigner – and outsider – to put on a panda suit and take part in the monthly health check.

But the patient was clearly determined to break his appointment.

‘How long do baby pandas stay up trees before coming down?’ I asked lamely, after half an hour of watching a TV monitor showing the youngster rocking nonchalantly back and forth on his branch.

The answer, I discovered, was as long as he damn well pleases – which in our case turned out to be some four hours and 30 minutes.

Hanging around: The young panda sits in a tree, where he remained for more than four hours before one of the scientists (right) was able to grab hold of him

Finally, with the weak afternoon winter sun glistening on sticks of bamboo strewn enticingly on the ground below, the baby panda – who for a combination of superstitious and sponsorship reasons will not be named until shortly before he is released into the wild – deigned to shimmy his way down to the ground.

This wilful, boisterous toddler could afford to make us wait. After all, he is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant panda. In scientific terms, he is pure panda royalty.

Born to a mother bred in captivity but kept in a 2,400 square yard outdoor enclosure since her pregnancy, he is the first captive giant panda to be raised in a natural setting with no sight of humans.

When he reaches six months old next month, he will move to a much larger 40,000 square yard enclosure with chickens, goats and pigs.

For the record: A scientist checks the little panda's medical notes before his next examination

Then, when he is two, he will take his first steps into the wild and the expectations of a nation will be resting on his young haunches.

The hope is that this giant panda – an unwitting pioneer among one of the world’s most endangered species, with only an estimated 1,600 remaining in the wild and 300 in captivity – will be the first captive panda to survive being released into the wild.

In 2006, China’s first attempt to release a panda bred in captivity ended in failure when Xiang Xiang, a five-year-old also reared here at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Centre, was found dead months later from injuries suffered during a suspected fight with wild pandas.

After three years of training by staff at Wolong, his death was a bitter blow.

Open wide: The panda has his teeth checked

That’s why no chances are being taken with this baby and why staff are going to extreme – some might say farcical – lengths to make sure he is tough enough to survive the rigours of the wild.

As we hunched over the TV monitors waiting for the baby panda to make his move, Huang Yan, the energetic vice-director for research at Wolong, explained to me how they came up with the idea of the panda suits in which we were sitting around so awkwardly.

‘This is the first time this has been done anywhere in the world,’ the scientist said proudly, through an interpreter.

‘We came up with the idea because captive pandas are too familiar with people. But by rearing them using the panda suits, the baby panda would grow up never seeing any people. That’s the idea.

'If we didn’t use these outfits, the baby would see humans and get used to them – and if he then saw people in the wild, they would seem familiar to him. We don’t want that because maybe someone might harm him.

‘So we designed the panda suits ourselves and then found someone who could make ten suits for us to use for our monthly health checks.’

The panda is put in a box to be weighed

ry measure for the benefit of one animal, but – as we were constantly reminded – there is nothing o

It might seem an extraordinary measure for the benefit of one animal, but – as we were constantly reminded – there is nothing ordinary about this panda, whose life has been played out as if he were in an animal version of The Truman Show, with a bank of television screens monitoring his every move.

The first months after his birth were particularly anxious. The baby was tiny with no hair and had to cope outdoors in rain and snow.

Mr Huang said: ‘The mother was very good throughout. She used her body to shield the baby and protected him from the wet and the cold.’

His progress since has been little short of remarkable. He has put on weight more quickly than captive pandas – mothers rearing babies in the wild have more milk than captive pandas – and has never caught a cold or had any health problems.

Ominously for us, the baby panda also started climbing trees unusually early. ‘He started doing it in December and his mother was very worried about him and tried to stop him. A captive panda wouldn’t start until two or three months later.’

When he eventually returned to earth on the day of our visit, one fearsome obstacle remained in the way of our entry to the enclosure: the baby’s overbearing and demonstrably over-protective 17-stone mother, Cao Cao.

Bare-faced: The Chinese scientists with our man Simon Parry and, right, research centre boss Huang Yan

‘If she thinks you are going after her baby, she will kill you,’ Mr Huang said. ‘Adult pandas are very large and very strong. They will scratch and bite and they will attack if they think they are at risk.’

No further warning was necessary. I cowered behind the monitors in the safety of the cabin as two of the braver men in panda suits ventured into the enclosure – one to pick up the baby panda and another to distract the mother with handfuls of freshly cut bamboo.

‘You can go now,’ Mr Huang told me at last and, struggling to peer out of the eye sockets in my panda mask, I stumbled out into the enclosure.

As I reached the circle of characters in panda suits holding a bewildered looking baby panda, I slipped on something soft.

I looked down to see the floor littered with large green dollops of panda droppings. ‘It’s from Cao Cao,’ one of the keepers explained afterwards.

‘We collected it in a bag and dropped it in that area to give the smell of the mother and soothe the baby while he’s examined.’

And the panda poo did the trick. Considering he was being manhandled by three upright pandas looking as much like the real thing as someone in a bad fancy-dress outfit, the infant was a picture of serenity.

As the vet and the keepers prodded and poked, he glanced shyly around, his panda eyes rolling endearingly.

At one stage, he bashfully put an arm across his eyes as I gazed down at him, making it hard not to feel almost paternal.

Looks, though, are deceiving where pandas are concerned. Mr Huang had given me strict instructions to come no closer than two yards from the panda.

‘He mustn’t be exposed to any more human contact than absolutely necessary. Even at five months, he can be quite aggressive and will bite and scratch – and it will hurt,’ he told me.

I watched as the baby panda was weighed and had his teeth and eyes examined.

Then he was subjected to a five-minute session of tummy massaging – which he seemed to enjoy – in an attempt to produce a sample of his own panda dropping.

The massaging was futile. This panda clearly wasn’t comfortable enough in our company to do what bears naturally do in the woods – and looking at the group of us surrounding him, it was easy to see why.

My suit was bursting at the neck and seriously short in the leg, leaving my boots exposed.

The vet and the keepers holding him and conducting the battery of medical checks had their hands slipped out of their panda suits to do their work. They carried clipboards, test tubes and monitors.

Meanwhile, a keeper with a video camera cheerfully filmed the proceedings in a panda suit – but with his panda head completely taken off so he could better capture the action in front of him.

With his examination completed and a maternal outburst averted by a fresh ser-ving of bamboo, the baby panda was at last placed gently on the ground – and immediately scurried away to his mother.

As we shuffled out of the enclosure, I wondered whether the monthly ordeal would produce a psychologically scarred baby panda.

After all, the process I took part in was the equivalent of a human child being wrenched from its mother’s grasp by a group of bears wearing pink suits and Spitting Image masks with clumps of fur sticking conspicuously out at the ankles and feet.

When I asked my interpreter – who watched the proceedings on one of the TV monitors – how it all looked, she confirmed my suspicions.

‘It was like watching an episode of the Teletubbies,’ she giggled.

But could these outfits really fool a panda?

Later, I asked an expert – Marc Brody, founder and president of the Panda Mountain conservation group which is working with the Wolong centre to prepare habitats in China for pandas to return to the wild.

He said, diplomatically: ‘It is an extremely simple idea and for that, it is just brilliant.’

Then he added: ‘Animals smell you long before you see them. Clearly the proportions aren’t right and the panda probably knows something is wrong by the smell.’

But the Wolong centre’s initiative was ‘a new chapter’ in the conservation of the species.

However surreal the experiment, though, its objective of preventing the infant from seeing human faces close up has been achieved – and the tests carried out during our visit confirmed that he was in the rudest of health.

0.4kg [23 lb],’ said Mr Huang. ‘That is very good indeed. And he is showing signs of aggression,

‘He weighs 10.4kg [23 lb],’ said Mr Huang. ‘That is very good indeed. And he is showing signs of aggression, which is what he will need when he is in the wild. He doesn’t like to be with people and that is good.’

It might have its comic elements but the mission in Wolong here is deadly serious.

The scientists hope to release three to five giant pandas into the wild over the next five to ten years to help build up the smaller, threatened populations.

They also want to change the methods of husbandry for captive giant pandas, hoping that in future all captive pandas will be born and raised outside.

Ironically, it was a natural disaster, the loss of two of the centre’s pandas and the destruction of much of the Wolong research centre that created the conditions for the baby giant panda to be reared out of sight of human beings.

Thousands of visitors a year used to flock to the centre to see scores of pandas being reared in captivity until the afternoon of May 12, 2008, when a colossal earthquake tore through the mountains of Sichuan province, killing nearly 70,000 people.

The epicentre of the quake was just 20 miles from the panda centre and boulders crashed down into the centre from the mountains.

Six pandas went missing – only four of whom were later found safe and well. Two were killed.

Nearly three years after the quake, the centre remains wrecked and almost cut off.

About 90 surviving pandas have been moved to a new centre 100 miles away and the research centre – once a hive of activity entertaining bus-loads of Western tourists who stayed in a ‘panda hotel’ at its entrance – resembles the set of a post-apocalyptic movie.

Its rusting gates are padlocked and old science labs stand deserted, their windows smashed by boulders.

Mr Huang and his team of 16 keepers and research assistants live in the shell of the old hotel where electric wires and bare light bulbs hang precariously from the ceilings.

The desolation – at first alarming and unsettling – becomes the centre’s great allure with time, according to one of the panda keepers, a woman in her 20s from China’s eastern Qingdao city who was drawn to work at the centre by her love for animals.

‘At first it’s quiet and lonely but after a while you come to think and live just like a panda,’ she said. ‘You fall in love with the nature and the solitude. You become happy just with your own company, like the giant pandas.’

For now, with his mother never far from his side, every move monitored by closed-circuit TV and a team of scientists in suits on standby to visit him every month for the first 18 months of his life, the existence of the baby panda in Wolong is anything but solitary.

All too soon, however, Mr Huang knows the day will come when the young panda will venture out on his own into a hostile, threatening and potentially deadly world.

Like any fond father, he seems already reluctant for that day to come.

‘When the two years are up, we will seek the advice of international experts to see if they think he is ready for the wild,’ he said.

The scientist paused for a moment before adding: ‘We’re doing all we can to make sure he’s ready for what is out there.’ Read more at www.dailymail.co.uk

 

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