Vanessa's Journal

Jan. 22, 2010

We’ve got company

OK, it is official. Two of our giant panda traps have been wholeheartedly adopted by the resident red pandas. We are now quite popular as the source of free meat to the surrounding red panda community. Two different red pandas have practically camped out just outside the traps so that they can run inside and eat all of the meat that we use as trapping bait whenever we aren’t looking.

Of course, we don’t see the red pandas with our own eyes. They wait until we leave and then they go in for the free food. We just see their little bite marks on the leftover meat scraps and maybe a suspicious looking footprint here or there. Those little guys are sneaky indeed. I would be mad about it, but it is hard to be when they are just so beautiful and fascinating. Anyway, they keep our spirits up in the long days of finding perpetually empty traps.

As for their related counterparts, the giant pandas, they are around too, but have just not made as strong of a statement yet in our trapping area. There is one panda at least that is wandering around widely in the area and another that is eating its way out of the bamboo near a few of our traps that are farthest from our field station. Neither of these pandas have gotten close enough to make us too excited for the time being. We are thinking it may be a while before these pandas and more fully infiltrate our trapping area, but we are ready and waiting.

While we sit and wait for pandas to enter traps, we have been keeping ourselves busy with wandering around other areas of panda habitat up here and seeing what kind of animals are around. Let me tell you, there are lots! In one day of walking a distance of just over a kilometer, we recorded signs from around 10 different mammal species! It is exciting to think about the fact that all of these different animals are wandering around in our midst. They are all right under our noses, but we rarely see them in person.

This is kind of the way life is for a wildlife researcher. You could go for days (or in my case years) waiting for a specific animal encounter and continually come up empty. But in the end, you know that it is still all worth it because it is a privilege to just share the same space with them and try to decipher the mysterious signs that they leave behind. They are all worth every day of frustration and every test of patience. In fact, maybe they make us wildlife researchers more patient and humble people by putting us in our rightful place as mere humans trying to stumble our way through this greater world of mystery.