Protecting Pandas

High in a mountain forest, a giant panda grips a stalk of bamboo. With its strong jaw, it chews and chews, crushing leaves, shoots, and stalk. As soon as the panda finishes one bamboo plant, it tears apart another. Rain falls, but the panda never stops eating.

Once pandas wandered through large forests in China and other parts of Asia. Today they are found in only six mountain ranges in China. About 1,500 pandas live in the wild, making them one of the rarest animals on earth.

Why are there so few pandas? Pandas must live where their food grows. Pandas eat bamboo-and hardly anything else! But pandas are not the only ones living in the bamboo forests of China. People live there, too.

More people live in China than in any other country in the world. People need land for farming. They use wood from forests for cooking, for keeping warm, and for building their houses. As China grew more crowded, people cleared forests and moved up the mountainsides where pandas once roamed. They left little food and space for pandas.

But now, people in China and around the world are making sure that there will always be forests where pandas can live. China has set up nature reserves where pandas and their bamboo habitats are protected.

Scientists study pandas in the nature reserves. They are learning about pandas so they can help them. They know that pandas live alone, except when they are breeding or raising their young. They have learned that there are many different kinds of bamboo and that sometimes one kind of bamboo will die out. Then the pandas need to find where another kind grows, or they will starve.

Scientists have also tried to find ways for people to live and make money without cutting the pandas' forests. Instead of farming, some people take visitors on tours of the forests. Others collect mushrooms and honey from the forests to sell.

Will there still be wild pandas in the future? No one knows for certain. But people who love pandas are trying to protect the pandas' homes. They plan to replant forests so that some day there will be more pandas in the misty mountains, chewing on bamboo.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Mar 2005
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