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Panda Under a Pear Tree
by John Seidensticker and Susan Lumpkin

It surprised us that the giant panda standing under a pear tree seemed small—smaller than Ling-Ling or Hsing-Hsing, the individuals that so shaped our mental image of giant pandas. Just minutes before we arrived, the young female panda had been sitting under the pear tree eating a pear. Now, we were 30 feet away when the panda turned, walked a few feet to a low stone wall, climbed effortlessly over it, and disappeared among the rumpled, spent corn stalks, soggy with early November morning dew. John followed, keeping about 30 feet away, as the panda ambled through the seven-foot-tall corn stalks clinging to this steep slope deep in the Min Shan, in a place called Pingwu County, about 150 miles north of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan Province.

The panda slipped in and out of view as John climbed up through the cornfield. Each corn stalk grew in its own soil-filled, rocked-up micro-terrace. This is very labor-intensive agriculture but it has sustained mountain farmers here for generations. The panda could maintain its effortless, robust, rolling gait for hours; and John was certain he couldn’t match the panda’s pace on this slope for long. But then, after about150 yards, the cornfield ended, and following became impossible. Emerging from the field, the panda climbed a steep, 15-foot slope face, and retreated into thick brush. There was no tracking the animal through that tangle.

The Min Shan (shan means mountain) are the core of panda country. About half of the remaining wild giant pandas inhabit this range of towering ridges and deep valleys. So do many people: About 183,000 live in remote Pingwu County, mostly on small farms.

The pear tree where we first saw the panda grew between the cornfield, a vegetable garden bright with ripe red peppers, and a small, two-story barn with a goat stall on the lower story. The barn, a long low-slung house, and a few other tidy outbuildings delicately placed among giant boulders were perched on a terrace overlooking a narrow gorge. The gorge with its clear, rapid stream would be spectacular in any setting, but here it was miniaturized by the towering slopes, in the way of a classic artistic rendering of a Chinese mountainscape. We had cautiously crossed a single-log bridge that spanned the gorge to reach this farm site, leaving our vehicles partly obscured by brush on the narrow track carved into the slope opposite. (Turning them around to head back down the canyon proved interesting, so to speak.)

We were traveling with Ginette Hemley and Peter Debrine of the World Wildlife Fund U.S., as guests of Lu Zhi of the WWF-China Program and the Sichuan Forestry Department. Lu Zhi had been a student affiliated with the National Zoo a few years ago; now she is one of China’s conservation leaders.

Our encounter with a wild giant panda came about when our hosts were notified of a potential panda problem and went to investigate. A meeting between the forest department officers, Lu Zhi, and the farmers was in progress when the rest of us gave up hopes of another glimpse of the panda and gathered in the farmyard. The farmers, small men and women dressed in clothing that signaled their Tibetan origins, were explaining just how a panda came to be under their pear tree. The young female, as it turns out, had spent the night with 30 or so goats in the goat stall under the barn. She had been herded into the stall inadvertently the evening before, when she mingled with the goats being put up for the night. In the course of the night, the farmers had heard a loud disturbance in the goat stall but had been reluctant to venture out to find out what the goats’ problem was. It wasn’t until morning that they opened the stall to release the goats. And to their surprise the panda also emerged from the stall. The goats went off to pasture, but the panda remained behind to eat some pears. And the farmers found two dead goats and one badly injured kid left behind. Lu Zhi was amazed; she knew of only two reports of pandas killing goats.

The farmers had lined up the victims on a large boulder, as the evidence of their loss in the negotiation that was taking place. The goats had not been eaten. The injured kid had blood only on one front leg. There didn’t seem to be any puncture wounds on one goat; the other had puncture wounds on its neck and back. The issues on the table were compensation for their lost livestock and what to do if the panda returned. It was decided that the farmers would be compensated and Lu Zhi would have her Panda Team of students from Beijing University fly today to Chengdu and drive to this farmstead to monitor the panda’s activity should it return. (Even in these remote mountains, Lu Zhi made these arrangements on her cell phone.) The students and forestry officials would wait to see if the panda returned and if she did, capture and move her to the Wanglang Nature Reserve, which was our destination too. We learned later that she did return that night and killed nine more goats for a total of 11 dead and one injured; she was captured, radio-collared, and released in the Wanglang Reserve. In the past this young, dispersing female panda may have been rescued and taken to a breeding center, but now she might become a member of the core wild breeding population within the reserve.

These actions are all part of an emerging, enlightened approach to securing a future for giant pandas in the wild. Conservationists are increasingly talking about the 4-Cs formula: For large Carnivores to have a future, there must be Core protected areas in the form of reserves; habitat Corridors connecting the core areas; and the participation and support of human Communities that affect and are affected by the cores and connecting corridors.

Here in China, conservationists and government officials are working to establish trust among themselves and with the local people most affected by the day-to-day activities of giant pandas. The prompt action by a team of students and wildlife officials shows an increase in the resources, tools, knowledge, and cooperation needed to implement conservation action. There is an increased awareness, based on our expanding understanding of panda behavioral and ecological needs, among Chinese wildlife officials about what wild pandas need to survive and how natural panda dispersal corridors in the Min Shan are disrupted by human activities. The new conservation action paradigm also recognizes that incentive payments for local people are a key to long-term success.

Lu Zhi told us she had a number of records of young female pandas dispersing from their natal areas. The farm "our" giant panda visited lies right in a panda dispersal pathway. Undoubtedly, other pandas will come this way in the future. What will motivate these farmers to contact authorities again if they are not satisfied with the outcome this time? Just and rapid compensation for lost resources seems a minimal incentive, but one that is often lacking when conservationists are seeking common ground with local people. A future program may include incentive payments for farmers to maintain these habitat connections, just as we in the United States might take tracks of land out of production and place them in long-term "soil banks" under Department of Agriculture programs. Increasingly, conservation planners are recognizing that stabilizing and sustaining what we are calling middle landscapes—the key habitat connections between the core reserves—is of primary importance to both local communities and to the future of endangered wild giant pandas.

Pandas and Priorities

Where did the young female panda eating pears on a hillside farm operated by Tibetans—and a leper colony, we were to learn—deep in the Min Mountains of Pingwu County on the northern rim of the Sichuan Basin come from? One possibility is that she climbed over the ridge from the Tangjiahe Reserve (one of the reserves where the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park conservation biologists plan to focus their efforts) in the next county. Or, she might also have come from other forest areas in Pingwu County. The 1998 trial panda survey, organized by the Sichuan Forestry Department and WWF-China, found about 230 giant pandas living in 1,058 square miles of forest in Pingwu County, but only about 30 percent of them live in the county’s three core panda reserves. Interestingly, the survey discovered that the remaining 70 percent live in other forest tracts stretching along the high mountain slopes of the county. (Compared to the results of surveys conducted in the 1980s, the number of pandas in the county seems to have remained about the same, but the animals seem to have moved to higher elevations and are more concentrated in the reserves because of disturbances related to logging.) These reserves and forests are home to wild giant pandas. They are where China’s national priorities and the giant panda’s basic needs intersect in a way that can define the future for wild giant pandas.

Pingwu County includes the very upper watershed of the Fu Chiang, a major tributary of the Chang Jiang, better known to Westerners as the Yangtze River. There has been ongoing logging in old-growth spruce, fir, and pine forests, mostly located in these upper watershed areas, to keep pace with China’s need for softwoods, which are in very short supply. So while overall forest cover has increased in China during the last half century to about 14 percent of the land area, logging has remained a major threat in what is left of giant panda habitat and to the giant pandas themselves.

But the massive floods of the summer of 1998 resulted in a sharp increase in China’s collective environmental awareness about the importance of these vulnerable upper-watershed areas in reducing floods. Previous gains from forest harvests, even for precious softwoods, and from increased grain production following forest clearance had been offset by the devastation caused by floods and landslides to downstream transportation networks and hydropower facilities. This produced a historic change in logging and land-use policy. Strong measures to reduce the risk of flooding were declared a national priority. As of November 7, 1999, a national decree banning commercial logging in these remote but vulnerable mountains went into effect.

The conservation of the remaining forests for protection against downstream flooding had become more important than the consumption of the softwoods they provided. In a briefing by Pingwu County officials that morning, they emphasized that the challenge the county now faced was how to find other employment for displaced loggers. Logging formerly employed about 3,000 people here and provided revenues for schools, health clinics, road building and maintenance, and other community needs. Aside from humanitarian issues, at least some of the 3,000 people looking to put food on the table could be expected to turn to poaching in reserves and other forest areas. The county representatives were therefore very interested in the integrated conservation and development project that WWF is pioneering in Pingwu County. Part of that plan involves increasing ecotourism. As we left the briefing we saw evidence of progress: A contingent of media people was leaving on what tourism promoters call a familiarization tour, which is designed to generate free publicity.

The Way to Wanglang

Leaving the farm, our little caravan continued on the road that wound along the river toward the Wanglang Reserve. John had been here in 1981 as a member of a Smithsonian-CAST (China Association of Science and Technology) group surveying areas for a possible giant panda field study. One member of our group, Wang Sung of the Academia Sinica, told us about his 1968 expedition to Wanglang to study the natural history of the giant panda. At that time, his team had to walk for four days to reach the reserve boundary. In 1981, the group had driven to the reserve in two-wheel-drive vans, traveling past picturesque villages and farms where people were plowing fields with teams of yaks. The roads are part of the logging legacy in these mountains. Now, in 1999, the landscape remained similar to what John remembered. Again we were traveling up this broad valley with occasional towns surrounded by broad, gently sloping open fields. Here again were people plowing their fields with yaks.

But at least one thing was new on this trip. We stopped for refreshments at Baima Township, a settlement of Tibetan minorities, and found ourselves being ushered into a cramped smoky kitchen with a central open fireplace. Here we were serenaded by young village women wearing traditional clothing, complete with two white pheasant tail feathers placed upright in their hair. As they sang and chanted and cooked, the ends of these tail feathers jiggled constantly, creating a festive feeling, enhanced by the strong wine downed in numerous obligatory toasts. Then we were fed freshly prepared pancakes of a sort and bits of meat from a communal pot. This was all part of a pilot program that featured local talent performing traditional rituals to attract visitors, hopefully to be translated into a new income source for villagers. Their goal is not to attract foreign ecotourists, but to increase visitation from people living in Chinese urban centers such as Chengdu and beyond.

Above this valley are forested ridges that, according to the 1998 pilot giant panda survey, were either inhabited by giant pandas living at low densities or were potential habitat for giant pandas. Valley-bottom villages like Beima Township threaten to disturb significantly the forested ridge habitats, but it is encouraging that the 1998 survey found more pandas living here than did a similar survey conducted in 1986.

The 124-square-mile Wanglang Reserve includes the very head of this long valley where the canyon walls start to pinch in, and clouds collect and inundate the area with rain and snow. We arrived at the reserve boundary in late afternoon and proceeded to the headquarters a few miles inside the reserve. Headquarters is home to a small staff of rangers, researchers, managers, and support staff; it also offers guest quarters. But it didn’t appear to have changed much since John was here 18 years earlier: just a handful of spartan buildings around a courtyard, plus a little modern technology. A freestanding basketball hoop—minus a net—occupied a central place in the courtyard, not far from the satellite dish. The buildings were sparsely heated and dimly lit, there was no indoor plumbing, but computers hummed in research rooms. (Power comes from a micro hydro-electric plant, made possible by the area’s many rivers. This plant was under construction in 1981.) As compensation for difficult living conditions, however, the site is beautiful—and pandas exist here. In fact, the best bamboo habitat for giant pandas lies up and down the canyon a few miles from headquarters at the lower end of the reserve and in bamboo forest that lies adjacent to, but outside, the reserve.

Travel in Wanglang is via old logging roads running along the main drainage, the Beima Ho (river). Just before dusk we took a walk up the road looking for tracks or whatever we might meet. John noted that bamboo had regrown since his last visit. At least two of the bamboo species here had flowered in 1976, and when John was here five years later many dead bamboo culms still littered the ground under large spruce and fir trees. But far from there being large homogenous bamboo stands like there are in other parts of the giant pandas’ range, the bamboo here is patchy and restricted to lower sheltered valleys and slopes, where the climate is cool and moist. Wanglang is located at the very edge of a microclimate belt that supports bamboo. Just over the major ridges, where there are very large swings in temperature and low precipitation, bamboo is absent, and so are pandas. At the highest elevations in the reserve are imposing rock faces that reminded us of the Sawtooth Range in Idaho, but which also don’t support bamboo. Thus less than half of this reserve consists of habitat suitable to sustain giant pandas.

Just up the road from the headquarters is an enclosure of several hectares with eight-foot cement walls. This enclosure was constructed when the bamboo first started to flower. The thinking at the time was that when the bamboo flowered and died en masse, giant pandas would starve. A primary bamboo species found here does flower at about 90-year intervals and its culms die. It then takes several years for the bamboo to recover fully from seeds. To save giant pandas, authorities had planned to capture and house some of them here so they could supplement their food and create a giant panda breeding center. All this had proved to be unnecessary in the end because not all the bamboo in the pandas’ range or even in this reserve is the same species, and so it did not all flower and die at once. We now know there are at least 12 species of bamboo in Pingwu County. Giant pandas adjusted their movement to take advantage of whatever bamboo species was available; they move seasonally up and down the mountains to follow the availability of tender shoots and other edible parts of bamboo.

On the road we were walking along were carnivore scats that may have been a dhole’s, a kind of wild dog that occurs in the reserve together with Asian black bears, leopards, musk deer, and takin. There were tigers here at low numbers at one time but they were extirpated by the 1950s. Roto-tilled mud revealed the presence of pigs, but not whether they were wild boar or domestic swine. Susan was walking in front in the gathering dusk when she signaled and whispered that she’d seen something reddish about 50 feet ahead. The russet fur of a musk deer perhaps? Then we saw a blur of blue clothing and heard the sounds of thrashing through the underbrush. Arriving at the spot, we found a yoke stick with bloody, meat-filled burlap bags tied on each end; the meat was takin. What Susan had spotted was the leading edge of the yoke’s bloody package poking out of the trees into the path. There was no sign of the undoubtedly terrified poacher, who had retreated up the hillside into the forest and deep evening shadows. Lu Zhi and a Chinese colleague kept vigil at the site while we four Americans were sent racing back to headquarters to alert the reserve staff. Lu Zhi could tell that more than one person was involved from the back-and-forth whistling she heard as she waited. But the hunters did not return and the reserve rangers’ pursuit failed to unearth them. Staff guessed they merely slipped home to a nearby village—and a meatless meal.

Hunting and snaring hoofed mammals like takin and deer for food in these forests has a long tradition. Giant pandas are at times captured inadvertently in snares set for these food animals. But will the giant panda’s long-term future be sustained by catching and prosecuting a few subsistence hunters? Killing a giant panda or a takin is already a serious crime in China; only those truly in need are likely to risk the consequences of being caught. It seems far better to pursue a giant panda conservation strategy in partnerships with local people, a strategy that offers alternatives to poaching. And this is one of the goals of integrated conservation and development programs: to encourage and reward local guardianship of giant pandas and panda habitat through sustainable economic incentives.

At dinner that evening and breakfast the next morning, one small part of this effort was in evidence. The mushrooms from these meals figure in a plan to develop a market for wild mushrooms sustainably harvested. The breakfast honey was "farmed" locally, another potentially marketable food product.

A panda conservation program that does not include the needs of local communities has little future. Already the watershed protection value of the forests has been recognized nationally as essential for the economic viability of China. Can this recognition of critical value be extended to giant pandas and other wildlife? The model program Pingwu County in partnership with the WWF-China Program is pursuing addresses this question. The key components are forest zoning; developing sustainable forestry and non-timber forest products such as mushrooms; creating conditions for ecotourism to flourish, including the preservation of old-town Pingwu; and managing protected areas with the input of local people. In all of these efforts, the need for watershed protection, the needs of giant pandas, and the very real needs of people are recognized, and the underlying economic well-being of Pingwu County is supported. This will make giant pandas stars in a process of ecological recovery and economic success.

We came away feeling that this process was off and running in Pingwu County, where people are learning that sharing space—and even a few pears—with pandas might pay off. Therein lies the future for wild giant pandas.

—John Seidensticker is Senior Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. Susan Lumpkin is FONZ’s Director of Communications. Together they are the editors of Great Cats and Dangerous Animals. John is the co-editor of Riding the Tiger: Tiger Conservation in Human-dominated Landscapes.

ZooGoer 30(1) 2001. Copyright 2001 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.

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