Is the panda a bear?
The Chinese call him bei shung, the white bear. They also call him nyala panga, the bamboo eater. We call him the giant panda and the big fellow certainly is fond of bamboo. But he is only partly white and science tells us that he is not a true bear. He is the giant of the raccoon family.
In his cage at the zoo, the giant panda looks for all the world like a bear decked out for Halloween. His shaggy coat is milky white with shaggy black stockings. His round white face is set off by two black eye patches, a black tip on the nose and a pair of black mittens which are really his ears.
The giant six foot panda is also somewhat bearish in his gestures and character. Through his baby stage, he is full of cuddly affection. Later he becomes a clownish show off, always ready with cute tricks to hold an audience. As an old person, he is apt to be grumpy.
In his native home, the panda dines on bamboo and dinner may last for ten full hours through the night, In summer he nibbles on the tender shoots and in winter he chews the leaves and crunches the tough stalks. In captivity he settles for a diet of cereals and vegetables, milk and a little cod liver oil. He uses his front paws much as we use our hands to hold and munch on a stalk of celery. Sometimes he dines on his back with a pile of food on his tummy, lifting each item daintily to his mouth.
The soles of the pandas s feet are covered with fur and on each front paw he has a bumpy pad which he uses as a sort of make shift thumb. These and other features were taken into consideration when science decided that the big fellow was not a bear, even though he looks like a bear right down to his stubby tail.
He is classified in the family Procyonidae, along with the bushy tailed racoon, the long nosed coati and the cute kinkajou of the New World. The giant of the Procyonidae family also has a small Asian cousin known as hun ho, the fiery fox. This raccoon sized fellow with a raccoon bushy tail has a furry coat of ruby red.
The giant pandas native home is in the Himalayas where the lofty peaks step down in high plateaus and deep valleys to China and Tibet. Just north of the tropics, some of the sheltered valleys are lush with forests 13,000 above sea level. Here in the dense bamboo thickets, the giant panda was hidden from the world of science until the 20th century.
The search for the panda in his remote home is a touching story. Three adults were sighted and shot and several infants were captured and soon died. Then, in 1937, a woman naturalist heard a baby panda sobbing alone in a hollow tree. The cuddly bundle was promptly adopted and taken to America.