text x_quick_Title2=Class: Mammalia~Order: Carnivora~Family: Ursidae~(Ailuropoda melanoleuca)
text x_quick=Where In the World~` Giant pandas are found high in the mountains of central China.~` Once, giant pandas lived through much of the eastern parts of China and into the neighbouring country of Burma (now called Myanmar).~` There are probably fewer than 1,000 giant pandas left in the wild.~ ~Take a Look!~` Giant pandas are from four to five feet long, with a small tail that is about five inches long.~` They can weigh up to 350 pounds.~` Pandas are bear-like in shape. They look like big, white, roly-poly bears with black shoulders, legs, and ears. Plus, they have big, black circles around their eyes.~ ~All in the Family~` There's a much smaller, fuzzy, red creature called the lesser panda which is the closest relative to a giant panda. Lesser pandas are related to racoons, while giant pandas are probably members of the bear family.~ ~Just the Facts~` Pandas prefer to be alone. It's not that they mind other pandas - if two meet, they won't fight - but they seem to have a better time alone. Only a mother and her baby stay together for longer than a few days.~` Pandas are most active when the sun is down. They start feeding at twilight and keep munching away until dawn. They're rarely seen in the daylight unless it's very cloudy or actually raining.~` The biggest part of a panda's diet comes from bamboo. They eat the roots, the stems, and the leaves.~` In order to survive, giant pandas must eat 20 to 40 pounds each day. That can take quite some time! Pandas do little else but eat for 10 to 12 hours every day.~` Occasionally, giant pandas vary their diet of bamboo. They've been known to eat other plants (like flowers and tufted grasses), small rodents, and fish. Mostly, they rely on the bamboo.~` A female panda can be pregnant for as little as three months or as much as almost six months! Apparently her body can put her pregnancy on hold for a few months at the very earliest stages if the local food supply is low.~` Her cub is tiny - it weighs just three or four ounces. It takes a long time to develop -its eyes don't open until it is between 40 and 60 days old.~` Pandas reach their full growth when they are about five or six years old.~` In the wild, a giant panda might live to be 15 years old. With the careful attention the animals can get in captivity, they can be up to 30 years old.
;Habitat
text x_hab= Giant pandas live high up in the mountains of central China. In warmer months, they spend all their time above 8,000 feet. (That's very high. If pandas suddenly decided to move to the United States, they'd have to rule out the entire eastern half of the continent as a new home, as there are no mountains that tall until you get to the Rocky Mountains.) If the winter weather gets very severe, the pandas will move down the side of the mountain to areas where snowstorms and blizzards aren't so powerful. ~\
Bamboo grows on these high mountains. It grows so tall (up to 40 feet) and so thick that there are entire bamboo forests - and that's where the pandas like to live. This rough habitat is one of the reasons why pandas are so hard to study. In a thick bamboo forest, you could be within several feet of a giant panda and never see him or her. If you were a scientist, you'd have to try day after day to find a panda in its home territory - or rather, you'd have to try night after night, since pandas snooze through the day and wake up around sunset. They sit in a bamboo grove and eat for almost the whole night and go back to sleep around sunrise. They're willing to wander around on cloudy or rainy days, but that means you'd spend all your time either dripping wet in the daytime or in the pitch blackness of a bamboo forest in the middle of the night. Not many people are willing to put up with that kind of discomfort, even for an animal as fascinating and appealing as a giant panda. It's no wonder we know so little! ~\
The giant pandas live in the provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. (Do you like Chinese food? The province of Sichuan is known for its cooking style, and many of the dishes you can get at Chinese restaurants are based on Sichuan - or Szechuan - recipes.) Once, they ranged from Burma (which is now called Myanmar) to eastern China as far north as the Huang River.
;Food
text x_eat= Giant pandas rely almost entirely on bamboo to eat. And they don't just eat the leaves - they eat the roots and the stems, too! If you tried a mouthful of bamboo, you'd find yourself chewing on splinters. But pandas love the stuff. They even have extra-thick linings in their throats to guard against the splinters. The problem with bamboo is that it isn't very nutritious. To get all the nutrients the pandas need to stay alive, they have to eat a lot of bamboo - up to 40 pounds in a single day. That's so much bamboo that the pandas have to eat for 10 or 12 hours a day just to keep up their strength. (Most vegetarian animals have the same problem - it's hard to get all the nutrition out of plants. That's why cows graze all day.) ~\
Bamboo has an interesting life cycle. About every 40 years, a species will die out for about a year, and grow back the following year. When the bamboo in one area dies out, the pandas simply move until they come across another grove that is still alive and healthy. ~\
The panda has an odd spur of bone sticking out of its wrist on the front feet. The spur is used to hold the bamboo securely when it eats. The spur isn't so important for the supplemental food the pandas eat, which include fish and small rodents every now and again. They also eat other kinds of plants, including gentians, irises, crocuses, and tufted grasses.
;Habits and Characteristics
text x_life= The story about how the first living panda ever made it to America is like an exciting adventure movie. Pandas are so shy and live in such remote areas that no living panda had ever been seen outside of China until 1936, and even the Chinese didn't know very much about them. Before then, Europeans and Americans saw an occasional panda skin, but no one outside of China had ever seen one alive. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were plenty of "big game hunters" - men who hunted animals for sport. One of them, a man named Bill Harkness, announced to his new wife that he was going to be the first man to bring a live panda out of China. His wife, Ruth, had a touch of the adventurer in her too, and asked if she could come - Bill informed her that "this is no place for a woman, little lady," and went off to China without her. (Men were considerably less enlightened about a woman's abilities in 1934 than they are today.) ~\
In China, Bill Harkness hooked up with another big game hunter. Then, almost immediately, the pair ran into bureaucratic problems. At that time, China was a series of smaller countries, each ruled by its own warlord king with his own army. Bill and his buddy couldn't get the permits they needed to travel to the panda's mountainous habitat. All they could do was sit and wait until a few warlords decided to change their mind and let them pass. So they sat... for 17 months. Then, for reasons that aren't exactly clear, Bill died. Back home, Ruth decided to go and investigate her husband's death. She announced that she had 'inherited an expedition,' and off she went. In those days, it was very bold for a woman to travel alone to a place as uncertain and dangerous as China was then, but Ruth was determined to get there. ~\
Once she arrived, she couldn't find out exactly why her husband died - the official reason was throat cancer, but Ruth suspected her husband's partner might have quietly done him in. By that time, Ruth had caught "panda-mania," and decided to capture a live panda in her husband's honour. She was suspicious of the partner, so she broke up her husband's expedition and started her own. She found a young Chinese naturalist named Quentin Young who agreed to go with her and off they went. Ruth had no trouble with permits because she didn't even k
