Panda Fever Sweeps San Diego

Like international royalty, the giant pandas Shi Shi and Bai Yun arrived Tuesday at the San Diego Zoo in a high-security motorcade escorted by the California Highway Patrol and trailed by news helicopters.

The phenomena known locally as “pandamonium” was in full evidence as the charismatic mammals arrived for what promises to be a 12-year visit for research, breeding and display purposes.

“This truly is the beginning of the North American rescue plan for giant pandas,” zoo President Bill Fox said at an ebullient news conference.

San Diego television stations provided live coverage of the pandas’ arrival. Some residents lined the streets leading to the world famous zoo, hoping for a glimpse of the woolly black and white animals from China, which were kept hidden in crates inside a covered van.

Even the rumor Tuesday morning that the pandas were on the way sent zoo visitors streaming to the specially built panda enclosure at the zoo.

“Are the pandas here yet?” asked James and Mildred Street of Phoenix. “Can we wait until they arrive? Can we see them?”

The wait, alas, will be 30 to 45 days as Shi Shi and Bai Yun are kept off public display during a quarantine and adjustment period required by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The motorcade was the final leg of a journey that began with an 5,949-mile flight on Air China from Shanghai to San Francisco and then a charter flight to San Diego’s Lindbergh Field.

When pandas were last at the zoo, in 1987 and 1988, zoo patrons would line up outside the gates each morning and then sprint to the pandas’ enclosure as soon as the zoo opened. Starting in 1937 at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, pandas have established themselves as the most popular animals ever to appear at American zoos.

Not for nothing has the San Diego Zoo spent $3 million and four years of work wading through the intricacies of U.S. politics, Chinese politics and international politics.

Only one other American zoo, the National Zoo in Washington, has a panda. Dozens of other zoos are clamoring for them, but there will be no additional import permits allowed until the Fish and Wildlife Service finishes reviewing its panda policy.

The San Diego Zoo was allowed to import pandas in advance of the policy being made final because its application was pending when the Wildlife Service, worried that importing pandas could hasten the species’ extinction, established a moratorium in 1993.

Under an agreement drafted by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the San Diego Zoo will not be able to make a profit from increased sales of tickets or souvenirs because of the pandas. All profits must be recycled into panda research or habitat preservation in the highlands of central China, the only place in the world where pandas are native.

Less than 1,000 pandas are thought to exist in the wild, their numbers being depleted by rampant deforestation, the disappearance of bamboo, poaching and the pandas’ quixotic mating habits. Babbitt is adamant that no pandas be caught in the wild for the purpose of being exported to U.S. zoos.

Shi Shi, a 16-year-old male, was taken into captivity four years ago after being badly mauled in a territorial fight. Bai Yun, a 5-year-old female, was born in captivity. Both have lived at the Wolong Panda Preserve.

Even after the U.S. government gave its approval to the import plan--under which the San Diego Zoo will pay the Chinese government $1 million a year--the plan seemed threatened by infighting among Chinese bureaucracies and then a cooling of relations between the United States and China.

To break the logjam in Beijing, the zoo enlisted Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has ties to Chinese officials dating to her tenure as mayor of San Francisco. Feinstein prevailed on Chinese President Jiang Zemin to approve the panda plan.

The two animals, which have never met, will be kept apart most of the time, although zoo specialists hope Shi Shi and Bai Yun will become parents. However, panda reproduction in captivity is problematic. The females only ovulate for one to two days each year. Also, captive females have been known to reject males, and captive males have been known to forget how to mount a female.

Zoo behaviorists will be studying how pandas communicate by leaving “scenting,” that is, by leaving urine on trees. They hope that learning how the animals communicate will assist in attempts to have pandas’ breed in captivity.

Officials at the zoo Tuesday expressed concern for Shi Shi. After being moved to a smaller enclosure this year at Wolong, he began exhibiting compulsive pacing behavior.

The zoo is in the midst of a controversy over its polar bears, which have picked up similar behavior--to the chagrin of zoo patrons and the outrage of animal rights activists.

“We’re making no guarantees, but we’re hopeful that in our more enriched, spacious quarters that behavior will disappear,” said Don Lindburg, behaviorist at the zoo’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species.