Mexico Zoo Has Magic Touch for Pandas

Against all apparent odds, Mexico City’s Chapultepec Zoo boasts the most successful, and natural, panda-breeding program outside China. And no one, not even the zoo’s proud director, can seem to figure out why.

Far removed from the rarified atmosphere of their native habitat in China, caged up in the smog-choked heart of a city so polluted that birds have been known to fall dead from trees, the plucky pandas are thriving.

Eight pandas have been conceived naturally, without any human help, at the zoo since its original “husband and wife” team, Pe-Pe and Ying-Ying, arrived here in 1975. The number of natural panda births is unmatched anywhere outside China.

Although the bears’ black-ringed eyes may give them the appearance of someone chronically affected by the high levels of pollutants that plague Mexico City, zoo director Marielena Hoyo says the pandas appear unfazed by it and are actually happy.

It certainly hasn’t affected their sex drive, she said.

Hoyo spoke at her zoo office, which is cluttered with the stuffed remains of several animals, including a baby hippopotamus, a camel, a South American sloth and a diminutive giraffe.

But distinguishing the office from a stuffed animal emporium were three of Chapultepec’s baby pandas who died soon after birth. Hoyo keeps their tiny bodies, each weighing about four ounces, in jars on a shelf in her office.

One was crushed when its mother, weighing about 260 pounds, took an unfortunate turn in her sleep. The others, twins by separate mothers, were rejected in favor of their brothers or sisters.

The interview was interrupted by occasional squawks from Sydney, Hoyo’s Australian cockatoo, and by her own raucous laughter.

There are various theories about the success of the Chapultepec panda program. One centers on Mexico City’s 7,300-foot altitude, similar to that of the bears’ native habitat in Szechuan, China.

But Hoyo described most of the theories as hogwash, preferring instead to talk about magic.

“There must be something magical here. . . . There’s something about this place,” she said.

A gorilla who never mated during 20 years in a zoo outside Mexico began to do so twice daily soon after his arrival in Chapultepec, Hoyo said.

“If that isn’t magical, what is?” she asked with the delight of a mother who just found the right wife for her aging son.

Four of the six pandas now living at Chapultepec are the offspring of Pe-Pe and Ying-Ying, the two original pandas who died within six months of each other in 1988 at the age of 14.

On July 1, one of the couple’s daughters, Tohui, gave birth to the only panda born outside China by a mother who was herself born in captivity.

The father of the cub, whom Hoyo affectionately refers to as her “Englishman,” is on loan from Regent’s Park Zoo in London.

The cub is healthy and expected to start walking soon.