My Giant Panda Page

My Giant Panda Page

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Maybe you ought to know...my favourite animals are pandas!

The Giant Panda:

Habitat:
Giant Pandas are found only in the dense bamboo and coniferous mountains of central China at attitudes of 2700 to 3900m. They inhabitat damp, misty forests of bamboo and conifers. Their preferred habitat has dense stands of at least one species of bamboo, or preferable more. Females have been found to stay in an area of only 30 to 40 hectares. The male's territory generally overlaps several female territories.

Enemies:
The adult panda has very few enemies, although while a panda is an infant, and has wondered away form it's mother, it has many enemies. The snow leopard or a pack of wild dogs may seize it from the ground, or a hungry eagle may snatch it for dinner. The worst enemy to the panda is man. Even the guarantee of a life sentence or the death penalty do not stop the killings.

Feeding:
Although giant pandas are members of the carnivore, they rarely eat mean. They have a ristricted diet of only bamboo stalks and roots, that makes uop 95% of their diet. There are only 25 species of bamboo that can be eaten by pandas in the wild. Since bamboo has a low nutritional value, and a panda has not got an intestine or stomach that is adapted to plants, a panda consumes up to 20-40 pounds of food each day. That means that there must be a large amount and range of bamboo shoots in order to survive.

Baby Giant Pandas:
Females are usually fertile for two to three days once a year sometime in April to May. Their gestation period ranges from 3.5 to 5.4 months. This means that births normally occur between August and September. The number of young per litter is usually one or two, but rarely three.

The cub is born with white fur on it's pink skin. Little bits of the white will eventually turn grey, where the black spots will soon be. The black markings will show up in one area at a time, within a month it will have black ears, eye patches, legs and shoulder band just like mum.The mum rarely leaves her baby out of her arms. She holds and hugs the baby against her warm body, licks it clean and protects it from harm. When she leaves her hideaway, she carries the baby with her, if she has twins she will carry one in her mouth and the other in her paw.

The Giant Panda cub will become independent from it's mother after 18 months after birth.