On Wednesday, the 2 grownup pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, and their 3-year-old cub, Xiao Qi Ji, have been coaxed into particular person steel crates on a cloudless autumn morning and pushed in vans to a FedEx Boeing 777 referred to as the Panda Specific.
Their exit was accorded all of the pomp of the presidential motorcades that zip by way of Washington: police escorts, waving bystanders and trailing journalists.
The plane, loaded with 220 kilos of bamboo, a veterinarian and two zookeepers, took off for the 19-hour flight from Dulles Worldwide Airport to China. There, the bears will be part of about 150 different pandas in a lush nature protect within the misty mountains of Sichuan Province.
And with that, an period of panda diplomacy ends, at the very least for now.
“It’s been a tough week, and it’s been a tough morning,” Brandie Smith, the zoo director, advised us journalists as we watched the crates with their furry occupants being moved by forklifts from the bamboo-lined Asia Path space.
“Please know that the longer term is brilliant for large pandas,” she added. “We stay dedicated to our program, and we look ahead to celebrating with all of you when pandas can return to D.C.”
Panda diplomacy right here started when Patricia Nixon, the primary woman, talked about her fondness for pandas — “I really like them” — to China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, throughout the landmark go to she and President Richard M. Nixon made to Beijing in 1972. Inside two months, China had despatched a feminine and a male panda, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the Nationwide Zoo.
The panda presence in Washington has endured ever since as a logo of the ties between the USA and China.
The black-and-white fur balls — they may as properly be waddling stuffies — had at all times struck me as pure diplomats: After I was dwelling and dealing in Beijing, I took my household to the panda analysis middle within the metropolis of Chengdu, and my 3½-year-old daughter developed an everlasting obsession with them.
However U.S.-China tensions have been rising for years, and now there’s hypothesis that China is asking for the return of the pandas due to the diplomatic deep freeze.
Zoo officers and scientists say the precise cause comes right down to biology, or “panda time.” The three pandas, they are saying, are every at an age when they need to be going again to China.
Mei Xiang and Tian Tian arrived in 2000, about one 12 months after Hsing-Hsing was euthanized due to kidney illness and eight years after Ling Ling’s passing from coronary heart failure. The 2 new pandas stayed for a decade underneath the primary formal pact, then remained underneath two consecutive five-year agreements.
That final one ended early within the pandemic, and the accomplice affiliation in China agreed to a three-year extension, which is about to run out.
Mei Xiang gave start in August 2020, at an age when scientists had thought she would not be capable of have a child. And so the cub was named Xiao Qi Ji, or Little Miracle. He was her fourth surviving cub born in Washington.
Zoos that host pandas exterior China often comply with ship cubs again earlier than they flip 4, and to ship adults again when they’re aged — Mei Xiang is 25 and Tian Tian 26.
“They’re on the age when they need to be in China,” stated Melissa Songer, a conservation biologist on the zoo who has labored with the pandas for 23 years. “I don’t need to have a panda go away exterior of China.”
Zoo Atlanta now has the one large pandas in the USA — dad and mom and twin cubs — however they’re anticipated to return to China subsequent 12 months. An growing old mom and her son within the San Diego Zoo returned in 2019, and Ya Ya, a feminine panda within the Memphis Zoo, flew again this April. Her companion, Le Le, was as a result of return together with her however died in February from coronary heart illness at age 25, an occasion that infuriated some Chinese language residents.
It takes greater than bamboo groves to host a panda. For starters, the Nationwide Zoo paid a price to a Chinese language conservation accomplice of $500,000 per 12 months for a pair (down from $1 million throughout Mei Xiang and Tian Tian’s first decade right here).
Regardless of the prices, the 4 American zoos which have constantly hosted pandas have labored with two separate conservation teams in China to safe the agreements. Ms. Songer stated the Nationwide Zoo intends to ask its accomplice, the China Wildlife Conservation Affiliation, for a brand new pair.
Xu Xueyuan, the deputy chief of mission on the Chinese language Embassy, didn’t point out the prospects of that in remarks on Wednesday with Ms. Smith, the zoo director. She did say that the “collaboration has contributed strongly to the mutual understanding and friendship between the Chinese language and American peoples.”
“Big pandas belong to China,” she stated. “Big pandas belong to the world.”
Till just lately, pandas have been thought of endangered, and so scientists on the Nationwide Zoo researched reproductive cycles to assist with panda breeding. Ms. Songer stated a feminine panda is fertile for just one or two days annually, and scientists monitor hormone ranges utilizing urine samples to find out when to do synthetic insemination. That’s how Little Miracle was born.
“We’ve it discovered, China has it discovered,” Ms. Songer stated. “It’s been an enormous success to breed them underneath human care.”
The panda inhabitants in China has grown, and now scientists are experimenting with reintroducing pandas into the wild.
Early Sunday morning, my daughter, Aria, now 11, and I watched as mom, father and son lumbered round their separate indoor and out of doors enclosures, chewing on bamboo, tumbling with plastic balls and clambering over boulders.
We puzzled whether or not they knew they have been going to a brand new residence. Zookeepers had been coaching them for weeks to get used to the transport crates.
They seemed about as cuddly because the stuffed pandas that Aria slept with each evening. Aria regaled me with countless panda trivia: “Do you know that they eat 14 hours a day?”
The crowds ballooned, creating a way of panda-monium.
Some had been coming day by day, and a few have been making a repeat go to after popping in throughout the nine-day Panda Palooza pageant earlier this fall. Others had heard the pandas have been leaving and had traveled a whole bunch or hundreds of miles to catch a glimpse.
“This would be the solely animal I try all day,” stated Denise Fesser, 47, who had pushed practically three hours that morning from New Jersey. She had a zoo membership due to the pandas and visited a number of instances a 12 months. When she travels overseas, she flies out and in of Washington so she will see them.
“Xiao Qi Ji is essentially the most enjoyable to observe,” she stated as she shot a number of pictures of him utilizing a zoom lens. “It was a type of moments of pure pleasure when he was born throughout the pandemic.”
The Allen household drove eight hours from Charlotte, N.C., to see the pandas for the primary time.
“I watched the panda cam daily throughout the pandemic,” stated one of many youngsters, Anna Kate, referring to cameras that the zoo had arrange years in the past to broadcast a panda actuality present on-line.
“Possibly they’ll determine methods to make a pact for them to come back again right here to their residence,” her mom, Gillian Allen, stated. She paused. “However China is de facto their residence.”