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The 2 grownup pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, and their 3-year-old cub, Xiao Qi Ji, are scheduled to be loaded into crates that day and pushed in vehicles to a FedEx Boeing 777 referred to as the Panda Specific.
They may then be flown 19 hours from Dulles Worldwide Airport to China, the place they may be a 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 will finish, at the least for now.
It started when Patricia Nixon, the primary woman, talked about her fondness for pandas — “I really like them” — to China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, in the course of the landmark go to she and President Richard 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 persevered ever since as a logo of the ties between the USA and China.
The black-and-white fur balls that may as properly be waddling stuffies had at all times struck me as pure diplomats: Once I was residing and dealing in Beijing, I took my household to the panda analysis heart 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 may be 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 all the way 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 because of kidney illness and eight years after Ling Ling’s passing from coronary heart failure. The 2 new pandas stayed for a decade below the primary formal pact, then remained below 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 beginning in August 2020, at an age when scientists had thought she would now not have the ability to 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 of China normally 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,” mentioned 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 move 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 in San Diego Zoo returned in 2019, and Ya Ya, a feminine panda in Memphis Zoo, flew again this April. Her companion, Le Le, was because 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 charge 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 mentioned the Nationwide Zoo intends to ask its accomplice, the China Wildlife Conservation Affiliation, for a brand new pair.
When requested about that prospect, Liu Pengyu, the Chinese language Embassy spokesman, didn’t reply. However he did say that big pandas are “friendship ambassadors of the Chinese language individuals” and that the collaboration between China and the Nationwide Zoo “has performed an essential function in enhancing the mutual understanding and friendship between the Chinese language and American peoples.”
Zoo officers mentioned they’d not requested the State Division to get entangled, nor did they intend to prod President Biden to place in a phrase with Xi Jinping, China’s chief, when the 2 meet in California subsequent week.
Till just lately, pandas had been thought-about endangered, and so scientists on the Nationwide Zoo researched reproductive cycles to assist with panda breeding. Ms. Songer mentioned a feminine panda is fertile for just one or two days every year, and scientists monitor hormone ranges utilizing urine samples to find out when to do synthetic insemination. That’s how Little Miracle was born.
“We now have it discovered, China has it discovered,” Ms. Songer mentioned. “It’s been an enormous success to breed them below 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.
They appeared 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 each day, and a few had been making a repeat go to after popping in in the course of the nine-day Panda Palooza competition earlier this fall. Others had heard the pandas had been leaving and had traveled a whole bunch or 1000’s of miles to catch a glimpse.
“This would be the solely animal I try all day,” mentioned Denise Fesser, 47, who had pushed almost three hours that morning from New Jersey. She had a zoo membership due to the pandas and visited a number of occasions a 12 months. When she travels overseas, she flies out and in of Washington so she will see them.
“Xiao Qi Ji is probably the most enjoyable to look at,” she mentioned as she shot a couple of images of him utilizing a zoom lens. “It was a kind of moments of pure pleasure when he was born in the course of 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 each day in the course of the pandemic,” mentioned one of many kids, 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 learn how to make a pact for them to come back again right here to their dwelling,” her mom, Gillian Allen, mentioned. She paused. “However China is admittedly their dwelling.”
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