Vanessa's Journal

Jan. 4

Today was a long, but enjoyable day. Lao Fan and I went on an expedition to Choushuigou, Fangzipeng, and Yuancaodi.  These are areas that are on the northeast side of Wuyipeng (current traps are on the south/southwest).  We were to scope out evidence of recent panda inhabitance that could dictate the potential placement of new traps. Turns out, the reserve management team members were also going down to Choushuigou, but were not going farther for the rest with us.   

This was my first time in Choushuigou and Fangzipeng, although I had been to Yuancaodi a few times.  I liked Choushuigou a lot.  Its name means “smelly water valley” because there is a large river at the bottom of the valley and there also is a certain type of plant that has a pungent odor that permeates the water.  I discovered that when they say ‘valley’, they really mean it.  When we got to the bottom I really felt like I was sitting in the bottom of a giant crater that went up in steep slopes on all sides.  The river also was quite beautiful. 

Choushuigou is known as a place where it’s common to see takin, a large hoofed animal that is feared by local people due to sporadic incidents of rogue males going on anger sprees and killing people. Those stories are rare and many times when one encounters a takin, it runs away from you rather than the other way around.  But people are still pretty careful.  So when we got to the bottom, one of the Reserve Management team members yelled out “TAKIN” and everybody dropped to the ground just to be safe.  It felt like an earthquake drill. Lao Fan, bless his heart, was insistent on getting closer to get a picture of it for me.  He told me to stay put and ventured down to get closer.  Apparently, it ran away so fast that he couldn’t get a picture. I didn’t even get a good look at it. It was too bad, but better to have an uneventful encounter. 

After that, Lao Fan and I had to go up the other side of Choushuigou to get to Fangzipeng (Toward Child Peak).  For a while there, it was like hiking up a mountain made up of numerous blocks of ice.  At one point, as we were sliding all over the place, I decided to go with Lao Wang’s ‘rock climbing’ strategy.  It was really about not looking down and not tripping. 

Once we got up to Fangzipeng, I realized why so many people had come to this place to do giant panda sampling and why we found an old left over trap there from the giant panda trapping expedition in the 1980s. It is an absolute giant panda heaven.  Even if you know nothing about the science behind it, there was really a special kind of energy up there.

One reason it is good panda habitat is because it is flat.  Pandas have a tight energy budget because they have short, carnivorous digestive tracts and thus only digest about 20 percent of the bamboo that they eat. Therefore, there is not a whole lot of room for spending energy on traveling on steep slopes.  It’s also good habitat because there is a lot of water and bamboo for sustenance.  In addition, there are at least three large ‘den trees’ which are large (90-100 cm) trees that pandas have carved out to protect their newborn babies during at least the first month after birth.  It was neat to see those and there was even some feces left behind in them from last year. 

The only issue we had was that there was no fresh panda feces.  We saw a little bit of feces from November that was likely another one of those rogue sub-adult males who got left behind when the social group ventured elsewhere.  But even that panda has potentially left the area. Therefore, it was like a ghost town. It should be brimming with activity but the pandas have gone elsewhere, likely neighboring areas that are too far away to monitor from our field station.

The reasons are potentially many, but the biggest culprit is the warm weather.  As we sat down for a quick lunch at Fangzipeng and pondered the lack of pandas, the sun came out in full force and I was feeling like I was on a picnic in August.  Yet it is January and we were on a mountain at an elevation of about 2,800 m.  I felt as though someone upstairs was teasing us, either that or trying to make it all the more obvious that trapping at Fangzipeng now is a waste of time. 

Yuancaodi (Originally Meadow) was more of the same story. We did, however, find one spot underneath a big tree where a panda had spent a lot of time in August.  There were more than 100 panda droppings in just that one spot!  But that panda is no longer around.

We got back to the field station after a long day of hiking with not a lot to show for it, although I did get to see a lot of Wuyipeng that I hadn’t seen before.  At night we had another rousing dinner with the large crew of Reserve Management folks.  And after that I helplessly pondered the direction of our trapping efforts.  Fangzipeng had long been a ray of hope for me and now it was gone.  I even got to the point of debating whether we should all move to another area of Wolong entirely and live out of a local farmer’s house while trapping in an unfamiliar area, but one that actually has pandas.