China’s first lab-born panda waddles into wild, history

BEIJING – Xiang-Xiang, a 4-year-old giant panda weighing in at about 180 pounds, hesitated for a few seconds on the misty slope, as if screwing up his courage, and then lumbered off through a forest of bamboo stalks to a new life in the wild.

With his waddle to freedom Friday morning on a Sichuan province mountainside, specialists said, Xiang-Xiang became the first panda born in a laboratory from an artificially inseminated mother, raised in captivity in China and released into nature to fend for himself.

Zhao Xuemin, deputy head of the State Forestry Administration, told the official New China News Agency that Xiang-Xiang’s release, by the Wolong Giant Panda Research and Conservation Center, represented a milestone in efforts by China and other nations to preserve the endangered black-and-white creature in its natural habitat among the bamboo stands of central China’s highlands.

Traditionally at ease munching shoots in thinly populated hill country, pandas became threatened with extinction as China’s population grew and farmers and loggers encroached. Saving the species has become an international cause, with zoos in the United States and elsewhere cooperating with Chinese scientists to foster reproduction and urge the government to set aside nature reserves where the people-shy animals can flourish again.

With a vast swath of land now protected in China, the State Forestry Administration reported last year that the number of giant pandas living in the wild has risen to an estimated 1,590, most of them in remote areas of Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces where they do not have to come into contact with humans. This represented a reversal of years during which the panda population declined, scientists said.

Specialists at the Wolong facility and its sister research center, both in the central province of Sichuan, have tried to build up a pool of mature pandas through artificial insemination so some can be released into the wild and, it is hoped, resume their natural reproductive cycle to push the population still higher.

Zhang Zhihe, director of the sister center, in Chengdu, said the number of pandas born in captivity has grown because researchers in recent years have learned more about how they mate. Nineteen were born and survived in the 2005 mating season at Chengdu and Wolong and a half-dozen more were born in foreign zoos, for a record total of 25, according to the State Forestry Administration and Chinese specialists. One of those was Tai Shan, a male cub born at Washington’s National Zoo on July 9.

Xiang-Xiang, born Aug. 25, 2001, at Wolong, was groomed for his release by training in a 200,000-square-foot open field beginning in 2003, officials at the center said. After learning to forage for food and build a den, he graduated to a larger field the following year and Wolong scientists decided in February he was ready to try living in the wild.