The call of the wild panda Researcher endures primitive conditions for strands of hope
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20000921/2668783s.htm
By Julie Schmit
USA TODAY
Having transcended its mountain home to become a citizen of the world, the panda is a symbolic creature that represents our efforts to protect the environment. A round, rather flat face, large black eye patches and cuddly and clumsy appearance give the panda an innocent, childlike quality that evokes universal empathy, a desire to hug and protect. And it is rare. . . . These and other traits have created a species in which legend and reality merge, a mythic creature in the act of life. -- George Schaller, The Last Panda, University of Chicago Press, 1993
WOLONG RESERVE, China -- His hair lies matted against his forehead. Grime covers his clothes. He exudes an odor of one who has gone 16 days without a shower and has hiked 150 miles.
But he is smiling. The Wisconsin native has in his backpack 60 strands of hair plucked from the ground where giant pandas slept -- and defecated. From the hairs' DNA, he hopes to identify individual pandas and ascertain whether the local population is large enough to sustain itself. Crawling through the muck, ''you can find 20'' -- his eyes widen -- ''even 50 single hairs,'' he says.
Matthew Durnin, 34, is one of the few Western scientists to live among the endangered pandas of remote China in an effort to understand them better and prevent their demise.
It is a tall order. The last census, 15 years ago, said about 1,000 pandas exist in the wild, all in China. Another census is expected in 2002. Panda habitat has shrunk by half in 20 years.
Farming and logging have destroyed the bamboo the panda eats. Panda skins fetch high prices. Decades of illegal poaching have decimated the population.
More pandas are being successfully bred in captivity; controversial work has begun to clone them. Yet experts express only cautious optimism that the species can be saved in the wild. ''Unless we turn things around soon, the risk of extinction in the next 25 years is very high,'' says panda researcher Don Lindburg of the San Diego Zoo.
Durnin knows that all too well. He spent two years off and on in the forest before spotting his only wild panda. One of his Chinese colleagues went 15 years without seeing one.
Over the past 30 months, Durnin has walked in the footsteps of Hu Jinchu, the first Chinese wild-panda researcher, and George Schaller, who in 1980 became the first Western scientist to study wild pandas in China. From the same camp they used, named Wuyipeng and situated at 8,300 feet, Durnin forages the forest, looking for clues about the giant panda as he works toward a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.
Durnin majored in biology and got a master's in environmental management. While working as a consultant in China in 1994, he met Pan Wenshi, China's foremost panda researcher. Pan's exuberance was contagious, and Durnin began setting up his field research plan.
When he's in Wuyipeng, lonesome for his wife of one year and the comforts of their San Francisco Bay Area home, he hugs one thought: ''I'm doing something most people will never do.''
Pandas were scarce, much scarcer than I had expected. . . . There were evenings when I returned to camp with my clothes sodden and body chilled, my knees aching, my notebook virtually empty. . . . One point was insistently clear to me: the essence of panda tracking was discomfort. -- Schaller, The Last Panda
Field research has changed in two decades. Schaller lived in a tent without electricity; Durnin had a wooden hut with a dirt floor and recently upgraded to a prefab, cell-like room that will have a bathtub soon.
He uses a laptop computer and a handheld Global Positioning System device to map his data. For weeks, his only contact with the outside world is the BBC news on shortwave radio.
Breakfast is rice gruel, steamed bread and pickled vegetables. Then it is off to slog through a mangled mess of logs, underbrush and bamboo in search of sites where pandas feed, sleep and make dens. Fog and drizzle are constant companions, as are ticks and leeches. At night, tired and wet, Durnin huddles over a 12-inch hotplate for warmth.
One year, his team constructed 22 traps to collect panda hair. They strung strands of barbed wire in the forest at the right height to harmlessly snag hair from pandas' backs. But as Schaller noted, ''Human logic is not necessarily panda logic.'' Durnin got just 15 samples.
Still, with 248 hair and 200 fecal samples, Durnin hopes to determine:
* The demographics of the panda population in a 64-square-mile area of the 785-square-mile reserve. If he finds deforestation has isolated populations, resulting in too much inbreeding, ''connective corridors'' of habitat could be established to encourage mixing.
* Whether more dens are needed. Pandas use dens to rear their young. If the forest doesn't provide enough dens to support a larger population, artificial ones could be introduced, he says.
Soon, the light of the forest will be replaced in Durnin's life by the light of the lab. Next month he plans to leave Wolong and spend six to eight months analyzing his samples at the San Diego Zoo.
Lingering until dusk one recent evening high on a mountain ridge, Durnin stops to listen to the forest -- to the sound of water dripping from the hemlock and birch trees, their outlines softened by thickening fog.
There may not be a panda for miles. But then again, there may be.
If it would just leave some hair . . .