You've never seen...Bear Style!

Names: Eileen Connon and Lindsey Keehn

Class Year: 2019 and 2020

Hometowns: Mandeville, LA and Crystal Lake, IL

Internship: Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding

Location: Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Ni hao again! We’re checking in from the Panda Base as the weather gets even hotter and the pandas get even cuter. Our observations are getting both easier and harder as we go along- easier, because we’re more confident in our data recording skills, but harder, because it’s getting a little more repetitive. It can be a little difficult to stare at a sleeping panda for half an hour at a time without falling asleep yourself! In some ways, though, the boring focal sessions are a relief compared to the ones where your focal panda keeps moving and you have to run around, standing on your tiptoes and (politely) pushing through crowds just so you don’t miss your point-time sample. 

The nice thing about the past few weeks has been the ability to really get into a rhythm here. Our first few weeks in China, everything felt so strange and foreign and different that it never seemed like we would find ourselves making a home here. Now, though, we’re regulars at a couple of restaurants, we have friends who live nearby, and Lindsey can recognize every single street cat on our commute to work (ask her about how many cat photos are on her phone. seriously). We also have control over our own schedules, so that if one of us hits a roadblock- usually keepers cleaning at an odd time that cuts into our focal time- we get to choose to wait it out or go back to our office to work on data entry or other computer-based work like these blogs! This in independence has been nice over the past few days as the temperatures has started to pick back up. House 1, where we spend half of our time, has almost no shaded viewing for the outdoor yard, so when the pandas are outside on a sunny, 35 degree (no Fahrenheit here) day with 90% humidity, we can choose to remain inside and double up on observations at House 2 or work on data entry. We always check in with James, but we typically get to decide for ourselves. 

We were also lucky enough to take a day off of work a couple of weeks ago and have a field trip to James’s old workplace: The Chengdu Bear Rescue Center! The Bear Center is a sanctuary mostly for Asiatic black bears, also called moon bears, as well as a few Tibetan brown bears and Tibetan macaques. We got a private tour from one of their wonderful employees, Ryan, who we found out has also worked at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia! We were very excited to share that a couple of our classmates are there this summer as well. During the tour, we were able to see their bear hospital, commissary, teaching vet hospital, education building, and, of course, lots and lots of bears. Most of the bears have been rescued from horrifying conditions in bile farms. We don’t want to get too detailed here, as the treatment of the farmed bears and the methods of harvesting bile are really gruesome, but suffice to say, the bears have a much better life at the Center. If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of international animal welfare issues, bile farming is a big concern here in Asia, and we definitely recommend you read up on it! 

An Asiatic black bear!

Don't you wish you could get this comfortable?

A Tibetan brown bear- an extremely rare subspecies 

A moon bear missing a paw from mistreatment in a bile farm

One big change that’s happened recently is that our friend Miranda went back home to New York! The trials for her project wrapped up last week, and we took her last day off to explore Chengdu with her one last time before seeing her off to the airport. It was definitely a bittersweet day. We’re going to miss Miranda a lot, but now we each get our own room! 

Before we sign off from this blog, since we really want you all to get a feel for how hard this stuff can be, we thought it would be fun to help you all learn a bit about how to tell pandas apart! Making sure we’re watching the right panda is still one of the toughest things about our job, but some are easier than others. So: there are a few different ways to tell the pandas apart. 

The first, and the most convenient, is distinguishing features. Only a few pandas have traits that are so different from the others we can tell who they are immediately. The easiest one to see is Qi Yi, who has a little tuft of fur sticking straight up on her head. Before we knew who was who, we used to call her Alfalfa! The other easily distinguishable trait is the black line on the side of Fu Lai’s face. Mao Tao has somewhat distinct traits, but they’re a little more subtle. He has white armpits that you can see behind his arms when he walks and on his chest when he lies back, and he has a scrunched up nose that gives him a good rugged handsomeness, like a movie bad boy with a mysterious past. His twin Mao Dou, on the other hand, has a much darker chest than all of the other pandas, and his “white” parts are also a bit of a darker color. Ya Yun always has some raggedy looking fur around her mouth and sometimes on one paw due to a licking behavior, and Ya Zhu has extremely wide-set eyes and a noticeable overbite that makes her snout look very pointy. 

The second way to tell the pandas apart, after identifying the more noticeable ones or if they’re all inconveniently turned away from the viewing area, is by the relative size and shape of standard traits. This may be the eyespots; some pandas have much rounder spots, some much longer, some are even particularly rectangular. This may also be the back band. This is really hard to use without another panda for reference, but it can come in handy. For instance, Cheng Shi has a very, very slim back band. Yuan Yue and Wen Wen have similarly-sized bands, but Wen Wen’s is very straight across his back, whereas Yuan Yue’s is slightly pinched in at the middle. You can also use the spots/cowlicks between their eyespots, but this is tricky to see at a distance. If all of the pandas are grouped together, you can also use relative body size. Cheng Shi is the biggest panda in House 1, and Ya Yun is the smallest there by far. 

A third way is just by process of elimination. This happens on those tough days when your focal panda is wildly far away, behind a bush, or sleeping on top of another panda, or, on really bad days, all three. Sometimes, all you can do is run around identifying all the other pandas just to figure out where the one you’re looking for is. This is the most common method used to identify Fu Shun, as well, because he lives with a group of pandas (Qi Yi, Fu Lai, Mao Tao, and Mao Dou) who are all very easy to distinguish, so it’s usually quicker to find the other four first.

The last way is not exactly reliable, but it is fun when you get it right. James calls it the “gestalt,” or the general feel/personality of the panda. It’s the vibe you get, you know? Sometimes you just know who a panda is because you see them walking and recognize them. It only really happens with animals you’ve worked with for a while, and its DEFINITELY pretty arbitrary, but sometimes it’s kind of easy. We’ve found that Ya Yun has a sort of anxious “gestalt” that you can recognize in the way she walks, how she looks around, the way she sits, etc. James also insists that Ya Zhu’s “gestalt” is stupid- he straight up taught us to recognize her as “the one that looks kinda dumb”- but we think she’s perfect the way she is. In any case, the “gestalt” is something we use to guess, but we never start recording until we confirm based on the physical traits.

So, what do you think? Think you could identify a panda with (seemingly) the exact same markings as every other one? Let’s give it a shot! We’ll put a couple of pictures here that we identify, and then a couple you’ll have to guess using the clues above. The answers will be posted with our next blog!

All of the pandas in Number 1: The far back left is Wen Wen, the two leaning on each other are Yuan Yue (left) and Ya Yun (right), the one in the back right is Ya Zhu, and the one in the front right is Cheng Shi.

All of the pandas in Number 2: Looking directly at camera is Fu Shun. To the right of him is Mao Tao. The one who you can see most of the back of is Qi Yi, and the one to the left of Fu Shun with just a 3/4 view of the head is Fu Lai. Mao Dou is hiding between Mao Tao and Qi Yi

So, who do you think this is? The one in front will be #1, and the one in back is #2. (hint: this is in House 1) 

How about this one? We think we gave you an easy one here for #3 (hint: this is in House 2)

Alright, #4 is a little tougher. Got a guess? (hint: this is in House 2)

And for our trickiest ones: #5 in front, and # 6 in back. You can do this! (hint: this is in House 1)

Check back in soon to see if you got them right! If you're struggling, don't worry! We took literally two full work weeks to identify them. All we did the whole time was just walk back and forth between number 1 and number 2, getting help from Miranda and James to figure out who was who. If this is the kind of challenge that you enjoy, maybe you'll want to come intern here!