Louisa Pearson: The giant panda remains one of the world’s most mysterious species

THERE’S something about giant pandas. Something that has captured the imagination of generations and has come to symbolise the global conservation movement.

The imminent arrival of Tian Tian and Yuan Guang at Edinburgh Zoo will bring giant pandas back into the spotlight and to celebrate their move to Scotland, a new book has been published – Panda: Back from the Brink (£25, Saraband). Packed full of photographs taken over a period of 20 years by Chinese photographer Zhou Mengqi, it gives us an insight into the life, history and habitat of this much-loved bear.

Edinburgh Zoo’s director of Animal Conservation and Research, Iain Valentine, has contributed to the book and he says that there is no other animal that elicits such positive responses in people. “They are obviously easily indentifiable by everyone and their markings unique and they appear to be completely unthreatening (although they are not). And of course they tend to sit or lie back when they are eating, which is akin to the way humans sit or lie back in a chair or seat, so there is something anthropomorphic about them too.”

The giant panda is still a gravely threatened species, with a population in the wild of only around 1,500, and a further 300 in captivity globally.

The book charts its fortunes, starting with its warrior-like reputation in ancient China. Far from being seen as cute and cuddly, the earliest reference to the panda comes in the Historical Record of Sima Qian, a scholar of the Han Dynasty, who was writing during the first century BC. He describes the panda as having even more strength and ferocity than the tiger or leopard. This power combined with outward calmness led to the panda being seen in ancient China as a symbol of both war-like power and peace.

The panda first came to the attention of western countries after it was “discovered” by a French missionary priest, Father Armand David. A prolific cataloguer of plants and animals, he came across and recorded the giant panda in 1869. By the early 1900s big game hunters were regularly visiting China in the hope of bringing back a panda as a trophy. A change in attitudes was sparked thanks to the actions of Ruth Harkness, an American who in 1936 went to China to claim the remains of her husband who had died there. She fulfilled her late husband’s mission to track down a giant panda and brought it back to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. As the first living panda to be rehomed in the West, it was a sensation.

The hunting of pandas was banned in 1961, but the real threat came in the form of industrial and population expansion, as pandas were forced further into remote mountain areas, prompting the Chinese government to set up the Sichuan region’s first nature reserves in the 1960s. Now there are seven reserves, comprising 1 million hectares, protecting many other plants and creatures as well as the pandas.

“There is still much that we need to know and learn about this species,” says Iain Valentine. “It is a species which has been around for millennia but still we know so little about it, largely due to the fact that they are very hard to study.”

The book tackles many questions about the giant panda – not least of which concerns its notorious diet of bamboo. It is classed as a carnivore, but 99 per cent of the panda’s diet is made up of bamboo, which it struggles to digest. On the one hand bamboo is in plentiful supply, but the panda has to spend up to 14 hours a day eating 40 per cent of its bodyweight in bamboo in order to obtain enough nutritional value from it. As a result, pandas are very careful not to expend any more energy than is necessary, so hunting rather than gathering is rarely an option.

From conservation efforts in China to an explanation of the day-to-day behaviour of these mammals, Panda: Back from the Brink gives us an insight into their world. “With a global population of fewer than 2,000 animals, this species remains critically endangered and in a fragile state, and we cannot ignore these sobering facts,” says Iain Valentine.

Panda: Back from the Brink by Zhou Mengqi and Iain Valentine (Saraband) costs £25 (including a donation to the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo) from www.saraband.net, the zoo and Blackwell’s.