When I was little, I wanted a panda for my birthday. Last August 22nd, which happened to be my birthday, the National Zoo, in Washington, sent out an alert on e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook: its female panda, the gentle Mei Xiang, had gone into labor. I signed onto the zoo’s Panda Cam just in time to hear an eek-y squeal from the back stall where Mei had built her nest. It was the birth yelp of a baby boy. A four-ounce butter stick, pink-skinned and blind, slipped from his mom’s womb and slid across the floor.
At a formal ceremony hosted by Michelle Obama, he was given the name Bei Bei (“Precious Treasure”). The former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tweeted a selfie wearing a giant panda brooch. “Guess I’ll have to call it Bei Bei now,” she wrote.
The panda prince finally makes his public début this week. He’s now eighteen roly-poly pounds of black-and-white fur. He recently found his legs, and waddles, unsteadily, around the panda house. His eyesight is still weak. He keeps trying to climb up walls painted with mountain scenes, which he can’t distinguish from the real rock formations in his den. But he’s a spunky little guy. Bei Bei alternates between tagging behind his mom and pawing persistently at her to play, even after she swats him away. He’s particularly enamored of his first toy, a red ball that he likes to wrap his body around.
There’s something about pandas, the world’s rarest bear, that captivates the famous, turns the powerful into putty, and wins over skeptics. In 1956, Elvis Presley travelled with a huge stuffed panda on a twenty-seven-hour train ride from New York to Memphis. On the first leg, the bear was photographed in its own seat. At night, the photographer Albert Wertheimer later recounted, the bear was strapped into the upper berth in Elvis’ compartment, its legs protruding through the webbing, as Elvis listened to acetates of his recent recordings in the lower berth. The next day, Elvis, not yet a national icon, perched the bear on his hip and used it to flirt with girls as he strolled through a passenger car.
Chris Packham, a British naturalist and the host of a BBC wildlife program, has led a campaign to let the species die out, because of existential challenges in breeding, food, and habitat. There are only about sixteen hundred pandas left in the wild, and some four hundred in zoos and breeding centers around the world. “Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,” Packham said, in 2009. The world pours millions into keeping them alive, at the expense of other, more vital animals that would better insure global biodiversity, he argued. “I reckon we should pull the plug. Let them go with a degree of dignity.” But Packham conceded that the panda has disproportionate appeal. “It’s big,” he acknowledged. “And cute.”
Washington, a city centered on crude, self-absorbed politics, melts over its panda bears. The first pair was gifted from China, in 1972, to mark the thaw in relations after President Nixon’s visit. They generated the zoo’s first panda groupies, some of whom are still active four decades later. Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing bore five cubs, but none survived. When Hsing-Hsing developed arthritis, a nearby Starbucks donated blueberry muffins, in which zoo vets hid his daily medicine. That became his favorite food. The capital of the world’s mightiest power went into serious mourning when the pair died, in the nineties. Local schools made sympathy cards to send to the zoo. The pandas’ pelts are still kept in a Smithsonian vault.
By then, pandas had become the unofficial symbol of Washington. “It’s a power town, and pandas are a power species like no other,” Brandie Smith, the zoo’s associate director for Animal Care Sciences, told me. “They’ve become synonymous.” In 2000, Washington opted to rent another pair from China—initially at a million dollars a year, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for joint research, and more for feeding, caring and staffing the pandas.
The couple arrived with fanfare. They flew from China on a specially equipped FedEx plane called Panda One, with a large bear painted on the fuselage. Mei Xiang (“Beautiful Fragrance”) and Tian Tian (“More and More”) got a police escort—and live television coverage—as their motorcade made its way into town. I worked at the Washington Post when their first cub, Tai Shan, was born, five years later. Few would admit it, but Post reporters regularly checked Tai’s antics on the zoo’s early, grainy Panda Cams. (They’re high-def now.) His squeals often echoed in stereo across the newsroom.
Bao Bao, a little girl, was born in 2013. Six weeks later, the government shut down because of a congressional budget dispute, and Bao Bao’s Panda Cam feed was turned off. The National Zoo, one of the few in the country without an entry fee, depends on government funding. The Internet feed was dark for sixteen days. “Our national nightmare is over,” NBC reported, when Republicans and Democrats finally reached a budget compromise. “The Panda Cam is back.” Within ten minutes, it was reaching its maximum capacity, of eight hundred and fifty viewers. The crisis led The Economist to conclude that pandas, despite their non-existent sex lives and self-destructive diets, are far more appealing than “costly, bumbling Washington politicians.”
For all their charm, however, pandas are far from profitable. “They don’t make money,” Steven Monfort, the chief scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, told me. “Every zoo that ever had pandas realizes they will not make their money back. Just building the infrastructure for pandas costs many millions of dollars, in addition to the cost of supporting, caring, and feeding them. The reason zoos do it is more intangible, including reputation and public draw. But those are worthless unless you can do something to help the species.”
Bei Bei is Washington’s third surviving cub—his twin died within days of their birth--and he may be one of the last. Mei’s fertility cycle is near its end, Smith said. The zoo’s panda program exists partly to diversify the genetic stock of the endangered species. It participates in a kind of eharmony.com for pandas. In the late seventies, zoos began keeping stud books on their males, in order to expand the DNA pool, Monfort explained. Tian Tian, the zoo’s male panda, produces decent sperm, but he’s never figured out how to copulate. He doesn’t “align properly,” Monfort said. “It’s pretty frustrating to watch the poor guy try to mate.” Tian pushes Mei to the ground rather than raising her high enough to penetrate properly. As a result, all of their cubs have been produced by artificial insemination.
For diversity, as its mama panda ages, the zoo turned to the global stud book to find another match. Mei was artificially inseminated twice last spring, with Tian’s sperm and the frozen sperm of a bear in China. “Fresh has better mobility, but sometimes you use both,” Monfort said. “You don’t want to waste a chance.” A female is fertile for only a couple of days a year. Tian’s sperm took—good for the public’s enjoyment of an endearing new member of the zoo’s panda family, but not as good for the long-term survival of the species, since he had already sired two cubs.
Washingtonians are oblivious to genetics. With each cub, the zoo’s Panda Cams have grown more popular. More than five and a half million viewers have clicked on the cameras in the four months since Bei Bei’s birth—double the number after Bao Bao was born. People get in a kind of Internet waiting line to catch a glimpse, lasting only fifteen minutes before they’re automatically bumped off.
Last week, I attended a zoo preview of Bei Bei and encountered some of the panda faithful. Merry and Allen Richon visit the pandas every morning before he heads off to work as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health. They regularly load their pictures on the zoo’s Facebook page. Why the commitment? I asked.
“Pandas have a karma,” Allen said. “They’re raging Democrats. They’re environmentalists.”
Karen Wille, a management consultant and another regular, has been to China—six times—to visit Tai Shan, the zoo’s first cub, born in 2005. All baby pandas go back to China after four years, for panda preservation. Wille pulled out a necklace pendant with Tai’s face on the front and his name, in Chinese characters, on the back. Her friend Christine Harper rolled up a sleeve to show me a row of panda bracelets, sales of which benefit panda research. Both are involved with Pandas International, a group based in Colorado that raises funds to buy medical equipment, computers, ultra sounds, and vaccines for China’s panda-research programs.
Angela Wessel, a zoo volunteer for four decades, used to operate the Panda Cam, on the 4 A.M. to 7 A.M. shift, before heading to work at Hewlett-Packard. She showed me a scrapbook with pictures of her in a panda suit, part of the Zoo’s education program for kids. “You expect kids to grab you and hug,” she said. “But adults do, too—all the time.” She has also has been to China, five times, to visit Tai, who is a notorious ham. Another woman in line was decked out in panda scarves and a headband with panda ears. Among the groupies, she is known as the Voice of the Cubs. She tweets about pandas under the handle @houseofcubs, a play on “House of Cards.” She has more than sixteen hundred followers. No one knows her name, and she prefers it that way.
I asked the zoo’s staff to explain the public fixation on pandas. “With lions and tigers, you’re simply a meal. All they’re interested in is eating you,” Brandie Smith told me. “Pandas are different. When you look in their faces, there’s an intelligence and dependence. You have the feeling, ‘I could be friends with this bear. If we hung out, we’d have a good time.’ ”
There may be a scientific explanation, too, Smith added. “People talk about the power of awe. When you see something that brings awe, it produces oxytocin.” Oxytocin, sometimes known as the “love hormone,” influences emotion and social behavior. “It makes you feel more of a community person. It’s happiness and togetherness,” she said. “So when you have those moments of awe—and aww!—you are biochemically becoming a better person. That’s what pandas produce.”