Shu Qin gave birth to a female cub on July, 16th 2016 at 14:03 in the afternoon.  Shu Qin was born August 26th, 2009 making her almost 7 years old at the time of her daughter’s birth.  This is Shu Qin’s first cub and she has shown very strong maternal instincts as a first time mother.  Shu Qin was mated with both Jin Ke and Xiang Ge on March 07 – March 08, 2016 so paternity tests will have to be performed to determine the cub’s father.

Personally, after watching her maternal care, I would have guessed that Shu Qin had raised multiple cubs before.  She acts more like an experienced mother with a laid-back parenting style.  While mellow, she’s very attentive and responds very quickly to her daughter’s cries.  Her calm attitude has clearly transferred to her cub who  complains very little for a one-month old.  Both mother and daughter seem completely content to cuddle all day long!

There’s nothing like a mother’s love.

Our maternal care studies have a couple of main goals:

1. Determine how maternal care personality affects cub personality development (is it nurture or nature? or both?)
2. Determine if females mated to a preferred male care for their cubs better
3. Determine how and when stereotypes develop and if they are passed on from mother to offspring

After seeing the public concern online about the abrupt weaning protocol of cubs from their mothers in China, I’d love to perform a future study that investigating the changes in behavior during these separations and compare them to cubs who are given a more gradual weaning.  Often changes aren’t made to management protocols until science proves that one method is better than another.  If you’d like to help fund this potential research project to improve weaning protocol for giant pandas please donate here.

Baby kisses to mommy, Shu Qin.

“Xiao Shu Qin” (the PDXWildlife team has nicknamed her “Dian Dian”, which means spot, because she has a spot in the middle of the white on her back) is starting to “army crawl” and is getting stronger by the day.  Her eyes should open very soon!

Xiao Shu Qin showing the little dot in the middle of her white back. We lovingly call her “Dian Dian”  even though the dot may disappear.

Aww baby panda paws! Is there anything cuter?!

Trying to wriggle free from mommy.

I hope you enjoyed my one-month photo shoot of them!  Here’s a few more parting shots for “babies first photo album”.

-Meg

Shu Qin and her baby posing for the perfect newborn baby shot

Shu Qin giving me the inquisitive eye as I tried to capture her mothering behaviors.