An ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China might be making things like fireworks more expensive, but one California zoo hopes it won’t stop the arrival of giant pandas by next April.
This week, Matt Bigler of Audacy’s KCBS Radio was on site at the San Francisco Zoo to get the latest update on when pandas are expected to arrive there.
“It’s very exciting. It is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened at the zoo in my 40 or so years here,” senior curator Patrick Schlemmer told Bigler. “We’re looking forward to it. The plan right now is to have those guys on display by a year from now.”
Although China refused to extend a loan agreement with the U.S. and reclaimed some pandas that were living here, Chinese President Xi Jinping said shortly after that more of the bears would be coming to the U.S., per an Audacy report. Last February, California Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed that his state would likely be the first to welcome new pandas. As of this year, pandas have settled in at the San Diego Zoo and at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Schlemmer said that the giant pandas are expected to arrive at the San Francisco Zoo this fall. Before they go on exhibition to the public, the bears will get some time to acclimate to their nee home in the Bay Area.
“The Chinese biologists themselves have a lot to say about the best ways to up the environment for these animals, so we’ve been working closely with them,” Schlemmer said. “We have… twice a month, we have zoom meetings with the Chinese biologists and we’re working out all of those details.”
One key detail is making sure they have enough of the giant panda’s diet staple, bamboo, on hand.
“It’s about 99 percent of their diet,” said Schlemmer.
“They’re very unusual animals. They are bears, so they’re classified as carnivores, but they’re vegetarian bears. They eat bamboo, which is a grass. So that’s, of course, another element that we've been working on. There’s about 25 different species of bamboo that they will feed on, and they eat quite a bit of it. We'll be offering about 46 kilograms or about a hundred pounds of bamboo per animal each day.”
He told Bigler that they have already started planting some at the zoo and that they will also set up some bamboo plantations in the local area to keep up with the panda appetite. As for the impact of the current trade war on the panda program, Schlemmer said it is a concern for the zoo.
“We’re just going to move forward and you know, hope for the best. I think this is actually a wonderful, maybe even unique, opportunity for our two nations to get together,” he said. “It’s something that we both agree on. We want to see the long-term survival of this species. So whatever else is going on between China and the United States, I think this is something that could bring us very closely together.”
Some groups are critical of keeping wild animals such as pandas in zoos. Recently, the LA Zoo announced that its remaining elephants would move to a zoo in Oklahoma where they have more space to roam. Regarding the plan for pandas to move to the San Francisco Zoo, the group In Defense of Animals has argued against the project.
While giant pandas were previously listed as an endangered species, Schlemmer said their population had increased so much as of 2016 that their status was updated to vulnerable. He said there are more than 1,800 estimated to be living in the wild, as well as around 600 in captivity.
According to the San Francisco Zoo, giant pandas don’t hibernate like some other bears in the wild – instead, they travel to warmer places to find more bamboo. In the wild, they live to be around 20 years old and in captivity they live around 30 years.