"Look! What are the critters in the video? Recently, when the technicians of the Longling Little Black Mountain Provincial Nature Reserve were collecting and sorting out the infrared camera video data, they were pleasantly surprised to find a small animal with brownish yellow body hair. After the identification of Ai Huaisen, a master tutor and senior engineer of Southwest Forestry University, it was determined that it was a red panda of the genus Red Panda in the family Red Panda family. This species belongs to the national level II key protected wildlife, and in the 2015 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the degree of threat of red pandas was adjusted from "vulnerable" to "endangered".
"In order to be able to detect the red pandas, we deploy infrared cameras according to their living habits, topography, possible walking routes and other characteristics. After nearly 7 years of continuous monitoring and changing monitoring points, the technicians finally captured images of the red panda's activities in March 2022. The red panda spends most of the day resting in trees or caves, and it is rare to see it moving on the ground during the day. Luo Guoqi, a technician at longling little black mountain provincial nature reserve, said.
In just over ten seconds of video footage, a cute red panda, shaking its small head and tail, slowly walked into the primeval forest next to the bamboo forest, as if looking for food... After a while, the red panda circled back to the original point, took a light step, quickly passed through the forest clearing, and disappeared into the depths of the bamboo forest.
According to Ai Huaisen, the red panda is also known as the red panda, the red cat bear, the nine-knot wolf, and the golden dog. It generally lives in areas such as mountain forests, primary forests, and bamboo forests of 2500 to 4800 meters, and prefers to inhabit tree caves, stone caves or rock crevices. It is particularly fond of eating bamboo leaves, as well as the young leaves of berries, flowers and other plants. In China, it is mainly distributed in Yunnan, Tibet, Sichuan and other places. Because of his cute appearance and rich facial expressions, he ranked thirteenth in the "World's Cutest Species Ranking" in 2013 (CNN Survey), and became an "Internet celebrity" in the animal kingdom for a time.
According to relevant information, the red panda is a national level II key protected wild animal, due to its narrow distribution area and small population, it is listed as an endangered (EN) species on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species (IUCN 2015), a vulnerable (VU) species on the Red List of Biodiversity of China – Vertebrate Volume, and Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES 2019).
Ai Huaisen said: "Red pandas are forest animals, which have high requirements for habitat and breeding land, in addition to the requirements for climatic conditions, natural ecological environments such as forest community types and forest species structures, but also have sufficient food sources (large bamboo forests) and good habitat quality. The monitoring of red pandas in Longling also reflects the good quality of the ecological environment here, which is suitable for the survival and reproduction of red pandas. ”