Our maternal care studies begin once the cubs reach one month in age. Even though we sit outside of the outer doors and only have a single person conduct the trial, this ensures that we avoid causing any undue stress from our presence. However, with an extremely busy breeding year, the cub season has practically taken over our studies with potentially pregnant or brand new cubs all over the place. When this happens, it limits where we have access to and who we can observe. But, this is a good problem, as the product will be a base filled with panda cubs in the very near future.
With so many little fur balls expected, we actually should have brought on a fourth intern to help with the maternal observations. As we conduct two trials per cub each month, just 10 cubs could fill up a whole months worth of work. Aside from the maternal care study, we are also pushing through our stereotypic observations. This by itself is a full-time job for two people. To say the least, our fall interns- Katie, Katelin, and Hallie have a full docket of panda duties. Now that everyone is on their 4th day of training to reach 90% inter-observer reliability, I expect that they will hit this goal in the next few days. Once this happens, the panda data will start to fly in, keeping myself and Meghan busy with data organization and analysis.
It has been a busy trip that began with setting up Gengda for reintroduction research and is settling down a bit with our continued presence at Bifengxia. We have such a wonderful lineup of interns that come from various backgrounds, which makes our program rich with experience and full of quality data. For this, we are very grateful to everyones friends and family for making the sacrifice by allowing their loved ones to become PDXWildlife interns. After all, we now consider them as part of our own family and treat them as such.
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Nathan, Meghan, & Dee- Your PDXWildlife panda family, spend several months a year bringing on and training future researchers. When we are not at home compiling and analyzing data, you will find us in Sichuan, China, at our main research sites at Bifengxia and Gengda. If you are interested in our program, research, or would like to know how to become an intern, don’t hesitate to email me directly- nate@pdxwildlife.com
