Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  What’s cuter than a red panda in the wild?
BackBack

What’s cuter than a red panda in the wild?

A project in Darjeeling is successfully breeding the threatened red panda to restore their numbers in the wild

Baby red pandas at the red panda conservation project in the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park. Photographs: Ashwika KapurPremium
Baby red pandas at the red panda conservation project in the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park. Photographs: Ashwika Kapur

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way. Kenya has just burnt the biggest ever stockpile of illegal elephant ivory. Last year was the worst year on record for rhino poaching. Roughly a hundred million sharks end up every year as soup on our tables. Monstrous forest fires in our own country, natural or man-made, have taken out whole ecosystems in one fell swoop. Clearly, things are getting very dark in the world of conservation.

But wait a bit. Without the dark, we would never be able to see the stars. The unassuming initiatives that take up the cause of conservation, despite the toughest odds you can think of.

You’ll find them in the most unexpected places. Take the toy train from Siliguri in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. After climbing through tea country and the pine forests beyond Kurseong, you reach Darjeeling.

That’s where I had gone not long ago to film a documentary on the red panda conservation project in the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park, as it’s formally known.

There’s nothing more cinematic than two curious little bright-eyed and bushy tailed red panda cubs exploring their world for the very first time.

It was a clear, crisp morning and the warming sunlight made it a perfect day for a panda adventure. Mother panda took the lead. She picked a small tree (a good place for the cubs to begin climbing lessons) and began climbing. She stopped midway to look back at her twins. Things weren’t going so well down there. They had made three attempts up the trunk and neither gravity nor their wobbly legs were doing them any favours. Mum came back down. With an encouraging tweet, she managed to get the braver of the two on to the first branch. But it wasn’t long before the tyke toppled over and found itself hanging upside down, squeaking desperately for help. As I filmed this panda jungle-gym playschool, I was not the only one who couldn’t stop grinning.

Most excited of all was a young Australian boy, all of 8 and full of trivia. “Red pandas are not even pandas, dad!" he exclaimed. He was spot on. Despite the name, red pandas aren’t the same as the giant kung-fu kind of panda.

In fact, don’t fall for those angelic faces. They have caused much confusion in the scientific community for years. They were misleadingly called pandas, which comes from the Nepalese word “ponya", meaning bamboo-eater.

But that was just the beginning. For a long time, scientists thought they were part of the raccoon family, given their size and appearance. But after decades of DNA studies, that theory was ditched. Then they were placed in the family of bears. But after further genetic probing, and with enough subtle but significant variants, it appeared that they didn’t belong there either. Finally, scientists resigned themselves to letting the critters wrap their tails around themselves and settle down smugly in a taxonomical family of their very own. The Ailuridae.

Over the last couple of decades, the Darjeeling park has been very much a part of these intriguing debates. Darjeeling is the doorway to the breathtaking mountains of the Singalila National Park, home to the red panda. In the early 1990s, in response to international conservation efforts, the park came aboard as part of the Global Captive Breeding Master Plan—a population management plan to promote conservation for the recovery and long-term survival of captive and wild red pandas. It is under that programme that four young pandas were brought in to kick-start the venture.

There is a special kind of magic about the high eastern Himalayas. A dreamlike quality steals across the swirling mists where the oak groves, conifers and bamboo forests appear and disappear. Clear mornings in Singalila yield spectacular views stretching from range to range, all the way to Mount Kanchenjunga. But spring is very special. Whole hillsides are flushed crimson-red with rhododendron blossoms. And it is here that the red panda roams free, its cinnamon-coloured coat seamlessly melting into the scarlet landscape of flowers, red moss and lichen.

Given its almost perfect camouflage, it is extraordinarily hard to spot a red panda in the wild. What’s more it’s a loner, and for the most part, very silent. Much to the dismay of wildlife shutterbugs, pandas also fancy hanging out at the very top of impenetrable canopies, far beyond the purchase of any lens.

Unless, of course, there’s bamboo around. Then there’s a very good chance it will climb down. If there’s anything the red panda shares with its Giant Chinese namesake, it is a weakness for bamboo.

And that is another evolutionary mystery scientists have scratched their heads over for decades. While the red panda is omnivorous and will eat an occasional fruit or leaf or even an insect or egg, bamboo makes up around 95% of its diet and serves as its only food during winter. But bamboo is a rather perplexing evolutionary choice. It contains little nutritional value, and to compound matters, a panda’s digestive system doesn’t even have the required microbes to help it properly absorb plant nutrients. Red pandas digest less than a quarter of the food they eat. In other words, they have to eat a lot of bamboo to compensate for their pickiness. Such a low-nutrient diet also means they sleep a lot to conserve energy, part of the reason why they are solitary creatures.

Except during the breeding season. In winter, red pandas choose to snuggle up with a partner. But the romance is short-lived. Once the female is pregnant, the male loses interest. Nesting time is stressful business. Not only does the female panda have to make extraordinary efforts to build a nest twig by twig on a meagre bamboo diet, she also has to choose the right tree hollow to ensure her young are safe from leopards, marmots and other predators. When everything else fails to protect her young, her defence mechanism is to stand on her hind legs to look “vicious", hoping to scare away her enemy. Now that’s something I would love to see. Cuddly mother panda looking vicious and scary.

But there’s nothing she can do about the biggest danger of all: man. Aside from hunting and poaching, the main cause of the rapid decline of red pandas in the wild is habitat degradation and loss due to rampant human development. It isn’t a surprise, then, that by some estimates there aren’t more than 2,500 of them left. Deforestation, farming, feral dogs and firewood-gathering comprise only a fraction of their troubles. Their highly specialized bamboo diet hasn’t done them any favours either. Fragmented forests, with patches of agricultural land in between, mean there’s no way for them to migrate to greener bamboo pastures or find new partners, which leads to inbreeding and disease and further decline of the species.

It is here that projects like the one at the Darjeeling park quietly step in.

Meet Upashna Rai, the resident biologist at the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park. Bright, animated and full of plans, her passion, courage and commitment are shared by her colleague Bhupen Roka. Both recognize that their work is key to the protection and survival of this species. The ultimate aim of the project is to be able to restore lost populations and give its captive-bred pandas a chance to survive in the wild. In fact, 2016 has seen a very significant expansion of the breeding project, with new facilities and open enclosures now established at a second location an hour away from the original breeding centre.

The new site has already witnessed successful breeding. At present, the park has 17 pandas, which include two of the oldest living captive pandas in the world, Shakya, 15 and Sheetal, 13. Over the last decade, the programme has witnessed 38 births. While several of the pandas have been flown to foreign zoos in exchange programmes, some have been released in the wild.

And so, as I looked at the little cubs in carefree morning play, I wondered if one day soon these little ones would roam free and easy in the wilds of the Singalila National Park.

That’s what Rai hopes for. And hope can be contagious. So as I drove down past the pine forests and the tea gardens and the Terai, I watched the turning road and knew that there are so many other places out there, with stories such as these, waiting to be told.

Film-maker Ashwika Kapur is India’s youngest and only woman to win the Green Oscar in a Global Category, also known as the Panda Awards. She was awarded for her film Sirocco—How A Dud Became A Stud.

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 10 Jun 2016, 10:08 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App