Vanessa's Journal

Dec. 26

This morning I sent Lao Wang and Lao Yang out to check traps because I was expecting a Christmas phone call from my family (it was their Christmas night).  It was sad to not be there.  I think I was doing well at pretending I wasn’t actually missing Christmas until that phone call.  They seem like they had a good time though.  I talked to both my parents and my three brothers.  When I called they had just finished a rousing board game where my mom and my brother Pat lost.  My brothers were all ganging up on my mom like they tend to do and she was wishing I was there to be the one other girl in the family to even things out.  From all accounts, the one who enjoyed Christmas the most was my cat Whiskers.  At an elderly 18 years old, she still knows how to have a good party.  She herself was a Christmas present in about 1990 and I think since then it has been her favorite holiday.  She is the matriarch of the family.  She even outranks the dog.  She likes to sit on top of all the presents and dig through the wrapping paper.  She also enjoys tearing up the boxes after people open them.  We keep praying that she makes it to the next Christmas and somehow she always seems to.  Once in a while she will get sick and we will all think to ourselves that maybe this is the end, but she still always comes out the other side.

I continued work on my reintroduction paper, which has been ongoing.  In the afternoon, I hiked down the mountain to meet with reserve director Hemin Zhang.  I hiked down and then walked all the way back to town only to find out that he was not there.  Not being one to return to Wuyipeng empty handed, I stopped to buy some oranges for myself and my field team and then continued right on walking in the other direction.  I walked all the way back to the base of the mountain.  At that point I had been walking for three hours straight and thank goodness I had an orange to eat, otherwise I don’t think I could have willed myself up the mountain again while feeling myself to be on empty.  When I was almost all the way up, the bag that I was using to carry my oranges broke and they all tumbled out everywhere.  Since this was the only thing that made the trip worth it, I struggled to pick them all up and stuffed them into my jacket.  Once back at Wuyipeng a total of 4.5 hours later, I was happy to have made it.  I was there not five minutes and then who showed up but Lao Fan.  He had hiked up right behind me.  He appeared with an orange in his hand and a smile on his face.  Apparently, I had left one on the trail.  He said he saw it sitting there and thought, this must be Vanessa’s! It was funny. 

I found out what was going on with Lao Fan’s family.  They had run out of food for their prized pig the day before and decided that it was time to kill it before it started going hungry and lost weight.  It’s about that time of year, as I’ve seen many Wolong farmers killing their pigs lately, but I think it just snuck up on them.  Lao Fan is the only one in the family who knows how to properly kill and gut a pig, so they all kind of had their hands tied without him.  This definitely qualifies as a family emergency to a Wolong farmer because farm animals are an important part of their livelihood as well as their identity.  Lao Fan is a leader figure for his extended family so it is a big responsibility that falls on his shoulders.  I think he was afraid to tell me because maybe I wouldn’t understand the significance, but I got it.  Anyway, I gather that everything went well and he even brought some of the pig up to Wuyipeng to eat. 

Update on field work- Lao Yang and Lao Wang saw another red panda today! This is the fourth sighting.  They think it was a different one from before because they said the coloration was much lighter than the others.  When they said that, I wished I had been out there!