With the safe and timely arrival of the winter interns, the season is off to a great start. Stephanie, Zach S. & Zack D., met me in the hotel restaurant for an ice-breaker dinner and everyone was for the most part, awake. We ordered a few typical Chinese dishes- twice cooked pork, egg and tomato & mapo tofu. I always get a kick out of first timers trying to use chopsticks with rice. A skill that gets exponentially better each week.
We spent the first day getting to know the city and meeting Mr. Cheng. After Stephanie (fluent in Chinese) helped me with an issue at the bank, I gave everyone a 25 cent tour which included my hotel location and where to find the supermarket. We met again for a quick dinner, but decided to call it a day at about 7:45.
The following morning we headed up to the panda base. With a 30 minute delay for road construction, we arrived around 9:00 am and immediately started into the work. The easiest way to begin introductions into our research is to jump right in. We walked the entire base collecting bear locations and meeting as many of the keepers as possible. As we are mostly new faces, it’s best to ease into this process.
With the International Panda Park empty, the breeding center is moving along at full speed with an overwhelming amount of cubs and mothers. This, however, makes our lives easy as we can conduct the maternal observations with little effort in not having to trek across the base. Mr. Dong, the cool cat that he is, introduced himself and a few of the other keepers. Always easy on me if the keepers are first to introduce themselves.
We then headed upstair of the breeding center to begin the introductory process to the behavior studies, which entails a brief explanation of the behaviors and how to collect this data using the iPad. It’s a bit of a sensory overload, but we find that it’s the easiest way to bring people up to speed. All together, the process of training the interns to a point that they reach 90% inter-observer reliability takes about 10 days. By the end of those 10 days, everyone can collect consistent data. By the end of their 3 month internship, they will be at a speed and reliability that makes their new training a marketable skill in the sciences.
Tomorrow, we will begin preparing fecal samples for the freeze dryer. Who doesn’t love playing with poop…?
