Red Pandas: All You Need To Know

Hi guys, welcome to our red panda talk today. My name's Amy and I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the two red pandas that we have here living with us. Just coming down now is Tilly, she's our female red panda and she's 8 years old. She's going to be 9 years old for the summer. But Tilly's lived here for nearly 8 years. She came to live with us from the zoo where she was born when she was around 10 months old. And we also have Nampang, our male, who's behind me maybe, just above my head. Nampang is going to be 3 this year and he's lived with us for nearly 2 years. And he came to live with us from the zoo where he was born on the Highland Wildlife Park. So we're actually hoping that these two will successfully breed. Tilly has had cubs with us here before and we already know that Tilly is an amazing mum. Due to red panda's solitary nature, none of the cubs that were born here still live here. They've all gone off to live at other zoos now as part of the European Breeding Programme. So what I've just given them just now is a little bit of fruit. We offer them a really small amount of fruit every day just to be able to give them a good visual health check and as part of our Meet the Red Panda experiences. It's important that we give them a good visual health check every day because they sleep for around 18 hours a day. And usually when they are asleep they are high up in the tree and we don't really see them very well. It's also important for us just to build a good positive relationship with them. Obviously as they're keepers we want them to like us and we want them to trust us. And by bringing something tasty every day just helps them to like us a little bit. But 95% of a red panda's diet in the wild would be bamboo. So I do have some bamboo for them here. I'm just going to stick this up here for Nampo. It looks like that's what he's waiting for. And then the remaining 5% would be made up of fruit and then small animals. So they're actually technically classed as carnivores. So they do have carnivore teeth and they have a carnivore digestive system. But they've just adapted to eat what's around them. And seeing as they live in the bamboo forest in the foothills of the Himalaya they are surrounded by bamboo. So they eat what grows around them and as I said they are solitary. So they have no competition for food whatsoever. But as I said they have a carnivore digestive system. So they actually don't digest the bamboo very well. So that means that they have to eat a huge amount of bamboo to actually gain enough energy from it. And in the wild they actually have to eat around 200,000 bamboo leaves every single day in order to gain enough food. When they're eating as well you sometimes see them using a really special adaptation that red pandas have. They have a special bone in their core which basically enables them to grip. Kind of like a little special toe but it's actually part of their wrist bone. And it means they can fold their cores in half. Now we hear lots of our visitors who might not be very familiar with red pandas looking at them and saying things like well it doesn't look like a real panda or it doesn't look like a proper panda. And my favourite thing to always tell everyone is that they are technically the true panda. They were actually discovered and named the panda 48 years before the giant panda was. Now they don't look like giant pandas for a very good reason. And it's actually that they're not closely related. They're actually in completely separate animal families. So giant pandas are part of the bear family and red pandas are actually in their own family called a luridae. But the reason why both animals have the same name despite not being related or closely related is because the word panda is thought to basically be a mispronunciation of the word ponya which in Nepalese translates as eater of bamboo. So they were both named the panda because they both eat bamboo and that's all they really have in common. The last thing I'm going to tell you about red pandas today is the fact that they are unfortunately a very endangered species. They are classed as endangered. No one knows exactly how many red pandas remain in the wild but it's estimated that it could be as low as around 2,000 individuals which is obviously incredibly low indeed. And they have quite a large range throughout the Himalaya. They're found in five different countries. So their numbers are very spread out. Now they are endangered for many different reasons but the biggest reason is due to habitat loss. They live in the trees, they spend nearly all of their lives in the trees and obviously eating bamboo as well they rely on healthy forests for their main food source as well. So where the forest is destroyed it's basically leaving them without any food and without anywhere to be able to live and take shelter. So actually the way to protect red pandas is by supporting charities that help local people living in red panda habitat and that's exactly what we here do at Paradise. We support a charity called the Red Panda Network which is an amazing charity that do lots of work in Nepal with local communities living in red panda habitat. One of their main initiatives is that they install more efficient stoves in people's houses. Sounds like a really simple thing to do but by installing a more efficient stove in people's houses it uses half the amount of firewood that a household needs to have. So that's half the trees that they're having to cut down. So it actually has a really really big impact. They also vaccinate farmers' dogs so the dogs can't pass diseases onto the red pandas and they train people on hospitality and looking after people and you can actually go with the Red Panda Network to stay in local villages high up in the mountains in red panda habitat and go with their researchers and forest guardians to actually find wild red pandas. So that does bring me to the end of my red panda talk but thank you very much for listening and I hope you've enjoyed watching these two come and have some of their food and thank you very much.