Sleeping car please
Visitors to the Edinburgh Zoo had their final chance to see and bid farewell Thursday to a pair of popular giant pandas who are returning home to China after more than a decade in Scotland. Yang Guang and Tian Tian are leaving after a 12-year stay. They have been a popular attraction since people lined the road outside the zoo to greet them when they arrived in 2011.
The two giant pandas who have lived in the UK will travel in “first-class accommodation” on their return to China, according to the chief executive of Edinburgh Zoo. Yang Guang and Tian Tian were loaded onto a truck in separate carriers on Monday as they left the Scottish capital on a specially chartered plane bound for Sichuan, China. David Field, of the Edinburgh Zoo, said the animals had practiced sleeping and eating in the metal structures where they will be kept for the 13-hour flight. Describing the carriers as “first-class bedroom accommodation.” Likely that the pandas would sleep for the majority of the journey barring the occasional snacking on the “odd bit of bamboo.” Asked how the pandas would cope on the plane, “They are in comfortable, warm, low-level light surroundings and they are just going to sleep for most of the time as we all do in first class.”
Michael Livingstone, a senior animal keeper at Edinburgh Zoo, will be among those accompanying Yang Guang and Tian Tian on their return to China. Describing how looking after the pandas had been the “highlight” of his career, Mr Livingstone said the handover marked a “sad and emotional” time for him and his colleagues. He said: “They’re very different to look after, as a team we have looked after many different species of bear and we were fairly confident we knew what kind of hurdles we might need to cross and jump over for looking after pandas, and when they arrived it was completely different to what we thought. “They are a very sensitive, very specialized species so we very quickly learned all the different things we needed to do with them or around them.”
Panda moanium
On average, a panda feeds for approximately 12 hours a day. It’s the same with humans under quarantine.
That’s why it’s called a “Pandemic.”
To start a zoo, you need at least two pandas, a grizzly and three polars.
That’s the bear minimum.
What did the panda say when his friend got a bad haircut?
“Don’t worry; it’s not furever. Plus, I bearely even notice a difference.”
Today, I saw twin pandas,
That bears repeating.
December 7th Birthdays
1989 – Emily Browning, 1952 – Susan Collins, 1978 – Shiri Appleby, 1995 – Jasmine Vilegas
1956 – Larry Bird, 1989 – Nicholas Hoult, 1973 – Terrell Owens, 1966 – C. Thomas Howell