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Like most other endangered species, the pandas are a victim of what Conway terms the "inexorable increase in human beings." Chinese farmers have chopped down many of the bamboo stands that once fed them, and the pandas have been forced to ever higher ground and smaller spaces. But bamboo is not very nutritious (90% is water), and pandas must eat as much as 40 lbs. a day to maintain their cuddly look. Actually, they love meat, but nature has made them too slow to catch anything worth nibbling on. So they are left with bamboo, which moves only with the wind.
The hapless animals are also bedeviled by what many other species -- rabbits, for instance -- would consider an unhappy sex life. Solitary by nature, they rarely enjoy one another's company. During their stay in New York, for instance, Ling Ling, who at 1 1/2 is too young for mating anyway, will never be allowed out at the same time as the six-year-old, heavier (187 lbs., vs. 119 lbs.) and presumably more aggressive Yong Yong.
One answer to the pandas' plight is obvious: the Chinese should give them more space and more bamboo. In recent years the Chinese, with considerable financial help from panda lovers worldwide, have tried to do that. They have set aside twelve reserves that have different varieties of bamboo; if one kind dies out, the pandas will not starve to death, as at least 138 did during a major bamboo famine in the mid-'70s. Indeed, Conway, whose zoo has taken a lead in preserving endangered species, gives the Chinese high marks. "They're spending more effort on pandas than the U.S. is on grizzly bears, which are even rarer in the Lower 48 states," he says. "They're an example to us."
But high marks may not be good enough. Unless reserves are made larger, he says, and connected so that their denizens can move from one to another, "the demise of the panda is predictable." He adds, "There are probably fewer pandas extant than there are Rembrandts. We ought to give them at least as much reverence as we give the works of man." The crowds cheering them on at the Bronx Zoo last week seemed to be doing just that.