Environment : Pandas Still Doing a ‘Vanishing Act’ : Roads, poachers and villagers take toll on endangered animals as China makes halfhearted efforts to save them.

Wild dogs were on the attack, intent on making a meal of a 6-month-old panda. Two peasants, roaming the mountainside in search of medicinal herbs, heard the commotion and frightened the dogs away.

But the mother panda had also fled. The terrified youngster, too immature to survive alone, was left clinging to a tree. The farmers reported the incident to officials here at China’s biggest panda refuge, who organized a watch.

“For two days, the mother didn’t come back and the baby didn’t eat anything,” recalled Chen Meng, veterinarian at the reserve’s research and breeding center. “At that time the weather was very cold, so we took the baby panda here. If we hadn’t, she would have died.”

Chen and his colleagues hope that the young female, whom they named Ying Ying, will help them breed more pandas. They are convinced they saved her life.

But the incident still reduced by one the number of wild pandas at Wolong. At most, about 100 wild pandas--perhaps only 70--still survive here. This is barely enough for a genetically healthy breeding population.

Only about 1,000 pandas--estimates range from 700 to 1,500--remain in nature today. Poaching and human encroachment on their bamboo forest habitat have pushed the bear-like creatures, indigenous only to China, into a sharp slide toward extinction. Costly but essentially halfhearted efforts to reverse the trend have met mostly with failure.

Whether future generations will know giant pandas as living creatures, not just as dolls and museum specimens, depends on whether China quickly begins to carry out more effective policies. The Chinese government now has 13 panda reserves, of which the Wolong Nature Reserve is the biggest and most important.

A spectacularly beautiful, 772-square-mile stretch of roaring rivers, verdant valleys and soaring cliffs in southwest China’s Sichuan province, Wolong could provide habitat for hundreds of pandas, which in Chinese are called “great bear-cats.” Proper protection work here alone might even be enough to save the species.

Instead, Wolong is bisected by a heavily used timber road used by trucks carrying logs from Tibetan-inhabited areas of western Sichuan. The dusty gravel road with its noisy traffic divides the pandas into isolated breeding groups and frightens them away from the valley bottom.

Even worse, pandas must share this precious turf with about 4,500 villagers who rejected a badly mishandled government relocation program.

The lower slopes of the reserve’s mountains, which could support thick stands of bamboo--the panda’s essential food--remain covered instead with corn and potato fields. Pandas are left restricted to a small fraction of the reserve’s total area.

Poachers also have wreaked a terrible toll wherever pandas still survive. Panda pelts are said to bring $30,000 from unscrupulous or ignorant collectors in Japan, Hong Kong or Taiwan. It was announced in 1988 that police had confiscated 146 panda pelts over a period of several years--a death toll from poaching equal to about one-seventh of all living pandas.

Since 1987, poachers and pelt traders have faced a possible death penalty. At least three people have been executed and 19 others sentenced to life imprisonment under panda protection laws, according to official Chinese reports. But even such harsh measures have not totally ended illegal hunting.

Wolong authorities have recognized for more than a decade that the best way to save the panda is to give it more room. But proposals to block the timber road and move villagers out of the reserve have foundered on bureaucratic ineptitude, weak political commitment and lack or misuse of funds.

“Pandas don’t like to be in places with too much human activity,” said Deng Weijie, deputy director of Wolong’s animal protection office. “They’re not like the animals in parks in Kenya, which are already used to humans moving about. If we want pandas to live in a place, then the people have to leave.”

An expensive but ill-conceived 1984 effort to lure residents away from the existing panda habitat in the reserve’s upper valley to houses built just inside its lower entrance proved a failure. Accustomed to living in simple but aesthetic homes of stone slabs and wood amid corn and potato fields, the residents were offered as an alternative ugly two-story cement structures clustered between the dusty road and a steep hillside. They refused to move, and the resulting ghost town stands today as a monument to insensitivity and waste.

Such failures at Wolong are especially notable because it has had the highest profile of all China’s reserves. Over the past decade, international organizations have donated more than $7 million to China for panda protection work, with much of the money used here.

Beijing recently announced a 10-year, $55-million program to set up 14 more reserves and link some of them by “bamboo corridors,” enabling pandas to wander from one to another so as to promote genetic diversity. This program aims to bring 90% of the panda’s surviving habitat under some degree of protection, up from 50% at present. But unless the new reserves are managed far more effectively than Wolong, even this effort will be doomed.

Scientists and zookeepers around the world are trying to learn how to breed and raise pandas more effectively, but success rates are stubbornly low. As of the end of 1990, 114 panda cubs had been born in captivity worldwide, but only 43 lived more than six months. A total of about 105 pandas, most of them taken from the wild, are now at zoos and research centers around the world.

Breeding work at Wolong also has seen little success. Only three cubs have been born at the reserve’s breeding center in 12 years. Two died. The surviving cub, now 10 months old, shares a cage with the baby brought in from the wild. Each of 18 other pandas at the center has its own small concrete room opening onto individually fenced grassy yards.

A lack of enthusiasm for mating on the part of captive males is one of the major difficulties faced by panda breeders. Both diet and physical constraints may be partly to blame.

“Normally, (wild) pandas prefer walking around and living separately,” explained Li Hongchen, a Wolong forest ranger. “But when spring comes--mating season--often five or six males will fight each other. A female panda will watch them fighting and then mate with the winner.”

Zookeepers and panda researchers, however, are reluctant to allow such dangerous battling--even if they have enough pandas for the ritual.

Also, Wolong pandas are fed far less bamboo than they would consume in the wild; they get milk and a special steamed bread containing rice, corn, soybeans, eggs and meat instead. Reserve officials consider providing a higher proportion of bamboo unnecessary even though some studies indicate that males fed primarily on fresh bamboo are more active sexually than those treated to a richer zoo diet.

Only about half of all baby pandas--born pink, blind, almost hairless and barely a thousandth of their adult weight--survive in the wild. And the death rate is even higher in captivity.

Researchers hope that artificial insemination, besides increasing the chances of panda births, can guarantee genetic diversity among captive pandas. The long-term goal is to breed animals that can be reintroduced into the wild. About half of China’s wild pandas--possibly more than two-thirds--are isolated in groups of fewer than 50, which is considered the point at which inbreeding becomes inevitable.

Meantime, the panda’s slide toward extinction accelerated in the summer of 1983, when much of Sichuan’s arrow bamboo, the most important kind of bamboo in their diet, flowered, went to seed and died. This is a natural occurrence that comes at approximately half-century intervals. Rescue efforts were launched with international support. Most pandas survived by moving to stands of umbrella bamboo on lower slopes. Others starved or became so weak they fell prey to natural enemies.

But the process that has reduced pandas to their current tragic state is really as old as Chinese civilization itself. Thousands of years ago, the panda roamed through bamboo groves that swept from the mountains of Burma and Vietnam to the banks of north China’s Yellow River.

“An increasing human population that harvested forests, cut lush bamboo groves and endlessly cultivated the land on slopes and hills shrunk the habitat of giant pandas,” noted a Sichuan government report. “Giant pandas could be seen coming and going in eastern Sichuan a century ago and on Mt. Emei (one of China’s most famous sacred mountains) as recently as 40 years ago. Now they have vanished from these regions.”

The question today is whether they must vanish from the earth forever.