Hua Mei with her little boy, Hua Rong, at the Hetaoping wilderness training enclosures.
First, Happy Earth Day! And second, sorry this post has been long time coming! But since my schedule isn’t getting any lighter I thought I’d throw up the pictures of Hua Mei and Hua Rong – her little boy! As most of you know, Hua Mei is like her mother, Bai Yun, and has raised many cubs successfully! She is famous for being the first panda born in the US to survive to adulthood and be sent back home to China.
The first day we went Hua Mei was down eating and Hua Rong could barely be seen in the top of a tree
Her father is Shi Shi (not Gao Gao) so she’s only a half sister to Mei Sheng, Su Lin, Zhen Zhen, Yun Zi and Xiao Liwu. Hua Rong was born on July 18th in 2013 at the Wolong Hetaoping wild training base, and is Hau Mei’s 10th cub.
For those of you unfamiliar with the CCRCGP, Hetaoping was the original panda facility and is more colloquially known as the Wolong Panda Base. This base was almost entirely taken out of commission by the earthquakes of 2008. Luckily most of the animal areas were unharmed or required little fixing to make them livable for pandas again. Hua Mei and Hua Rong have been living in the first phase reintroduction training area at Hetaoping since October 2014. This means that Hua Rong is a potential candidate to be released into the wild if his training continues to go well – Yay!!
Hua Rong’s baby butt in the pine tree
The first day we went to visit Hua Mei was out eating but Hua Rong was fast asleep in the top of a pine tree. I was worried that I wouldn’t get a good picture – just like with Su Lin and her cub. Luckily, the second day in the morning they were both out eating bamboo and right before we left back to Ya’an we got to hike to the top of the enclosures and Hua Rong was sleeping in the top of a tree with a clear shot from the trail (while we were quietly sneaking at the back so that they didn’t know we were there, of course!).
As you can see from the photos, they look completely content. Reintroduction training seems to agree with them both! Aren’t they just the cutest? You can see why Hua Mei won the hearts of millions at the San Diego Zoo!
See the whole slide show below for more pictures.
– Meg
[slideshow_deploy id=’3597′]
Thank you, Meg!
Always a pleasure – just sorry it was so late in coming!
I’m having trouble getting the Zhen Zhen article to load properly on my iPad tonight–I can get to the page that shows the new articles but can’t go any farther. Looking forward to reading it!
Your comment has prompted me to do something on my task list that has been looming for a long time – fix our “mobile” site. I’ll be working on this tonight but in the meantime what I was seeing on my iPad was that if I view the regular site (not mobile) the new post section was being cut off and you could barely see the link right below Zhen Zhen’s ears. If I clicked there it took me to the post. Hope this works for you while I fight with the mobile site settings!
Done and Done! Try it now and check out the new mobile app features 🙂
Just checked on my phone and it works great now! Everything was all piled on top of itself before and I couldn’t even tell there was a link to get to. Thanks for fixing everything!