Dispatch 5 – Wolong Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province, China

by Sue Nichols

WOLONG NATURE RESERVE, Sichuan Province, China – Field biology may not exactly be a spectator sport. I don’t expect Spartan Stadium to be filled any time soon with fans cheering on a wildlife ecologist scouting for feces, but allow me to make a case for the scientist as athlete.

I have come from the top of a Chinese mountain bearing wisdom.

Science is hard.

Hard like climbing nearly 10 hours in some of the most rugged terrain a planet can offer – steep inclines, rocks, mud, heavy brush, bugs and thin air. Hard like hauling pounds and pounds of equipment – from Global Positioning Satellite machinery to food and water. Hard like keeping your eyes peeled for the impossible – scant signs of a rare animal you get to know by its tracks, its table scraps and its poop.

Somebody ought to give these folks letters beyond P H and D.

Today the panda research team gave Kevin and me a glimpse of how they spend their days in China. It’s daunting management – organizing supplies, equipment and volunteers to go to a place in which you can’t run back if you forget something. It’s physically taxing and more than a little dangerous, though Professor Jack Liu is a stickler for precautions and the nonnegotiable safety in numbers. One twisted ankle, one slip on a narrow, muddy trail, and an afternoon’s research could turn into one of those made–for–TV movies.

We watched as they surveyed different panda habitats. Good habitats offer lots of choice bamboo, mature trees strong enough to hold a napping panda and a comfy slope. Destroyed habitats contain wiped out acres of bamboo by logging. Once the bamboo niche is overtaken by other vegetation, it’s possible bamboo may never return. Returning habitats show signs of forest regeneration, creating areas in which a panda can live.

Graduate student Scott Bearer showed off his work with the Global Positioning System, striving to merge data the team already collected from satellites which maps suitable panda real estate with what actually is on the ground for a more complete picture. He and fellow student Guangming He will be here six months gathering information. Their fieldwork can take them out in the forests for up to 10 days at a time.

Bearer also catalogs evidence of panda activity in different areas, working to build a picture of where panda are living, and thus how successful habitats are. This means looking at a lot of panda poop – the elusive animal’s calling card. Poop tells a lot – nutritional information, where it has been and even bite length of a particular panda. So Bearer picks it apart (since pandas eat bamboo almost exclusively, it’s fibrous and dry, kind of like flaky footballs), measures bamboo chunks with calipers and carefully logs it in notebooks.

It’s not all glamorous, until you look out at the magnificent vistas offered up from the top of a mountain. And the big picture is a trophy beyond compare: saving the pandas.

"If we can allow panda habitats to get further down the mountain again, eventually they can connect again," Bearer said. "Maybe we can get a corridor developed to allow pandas to travel to one another and they won’t be so isolated."

Forget the letter idea. They have their eye on the prize.