Wolong, Home of the Panda

Crack.

A dry, clean sound, carrying out of the mist.

Then another crack. Then another.

All around is a bamboo forest, soaked after rain. The leaves droop, water beading at their tips, and now and then a drop falls onto the layer of rotting leaves below. The mist is so thick that two people about ten steps apart can no longer see each other. There is no birdsong. There is no wind. There is only that cracking, steady and slow, as if someone were patiently snapping a bamboo stem, one length at a time.

And the sound does not stop.

A minute passes, and still it cracks. Ten minutes, and still it cracks. An hour later the mist has thinned and a few shafts of sunlight have slipped through, yet the same sound still comes from the thicket ahead. Not faster. Not slower. Without a pause.

Then the bamboo leaves part.

A giant panda is sitting flat at the foot of the stems, its hind legs splayed out comfortably, like a child sitting at play in a courtyard. In its two front paws is a stem of bamboo, still green. It lifts the stem to its mouth, bites off a length, spits out the hard outer skin, and eats the soft core inside. When that length is done, it turns the stem and bites into the next.

So that is what the cracking was. Only an animal eating.

The reason the sound never stops lies in some rather strange arithmetic.

Every day, a giant panda eats 32 to 45 kilograms of bamboo. That is heavier than a child starting first grade. And it spends 10 to 16 hours a day just finding bamboo and eating it, which takes up most of the day and part of the night as well.

There are two reasons. Bamboo is very poor food. And inside the animal lies a contradiction that is hard to believe. Its gut is more like the gut of a meat eater than that of a plant eater. Most of what it chews passes out again almost whole. The only way to get enough to live on is to eat a great deal, and to eat without stopping.

Bamboo makes up more than 98 percent of this animal's diet. It eats more than 40 kinds of bamboo, each growing at its own level on the mountain, so it follows the bamboo up and down the slopes with the seasons. In spring it picks the shoots, the youngest and sweetest part. In summer and autumn it eats the leaves. In winter, when the bamboo has nearly stopped growing, it eats the stems and the old leaves.

There is one more detail, right at the paw.

A panda does not grip bamboo with a thumb, because it has no thumb like a human one. In that place it has a wrist bone that has grown long and large, wrapped in a soft pad of flesh. When the panda closes its paw, that bone fits against the other fingers, just enough to hold a slippery stem tight. It is a sixth finger, made of wrist bone. Thanks to it, a large animal can sit and eat as neatly as a person stripping a stalk of sugarcane.

Now the view pulls back from that thicket.

This stretch of forest lies on two mountain ranges called the Qionglai and the Jiajin, in the west of Sichuan, a province of China. The whole bamboo country covers 924,500 hectares. It is made up of seven nature reserves and nine scenic parks joined together, and the one in the middle is called Wolong. More than 30 percent of the world's wild giant pandas live in this forest. In 2006, it was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a natural site.

It is the largest unbroken stretch of habitat left to the giant panda, an animal that has survived from the ancient tropical forests of the Tertiary period. People have counted 5,000 to 6,000 kinds of plants here, among the richest plant life of any temperate region. The panda does not live alone. The same forest holds red pandas with chestnut fur, snow leopards, clouded leopards, and more than 300 kinds of birds.

And this is the most important part.

To keep the panda, people cannot keep only the panda. They have to keep the whole bamboo forest.

An animal that eats so much needs a very large area of bamboo. It needs stands of bamboo joined to one another, not scattered patches. When a forest is broken into small pieces far apart, a panda searching for food runs out of road. So the seven reserves and nine parks were not set up to keep an animal behind glass. They were set up to keep the stands of bamboo connected.

The work has paid off. A major survey counted about 1,864 giant pandas living in the wild. That does not sound like many. But compared with a few decades earlier, the number has gone up, and it went up because the forest was protected and then replanted. In 2016, on the international scale that ranks the world's species by risk, the giant panda was moved down from endangered to vulnerable.

Vulnerable, not safe. The species is still on the list of those that need protection. The forest keepers at Wolong still go out on patrol, still count, still replant trees where the forest has grown thin. What has changed is one small thing, but a precious one: the number has stopped going down.

What makes this animal so hard to believe is not only the amount of bamboo it eats. Just as much of it lies at the very start of its life.

A newborn panda is so small that it fits in the palm of a human hand, about the size of a stick of butter. It is pink and hairless, and its eyes are still closed. Next to its mother, the tiny creature is only about one part in 900 of her size. It opens its eyes for the first time only after 6 to 8 weeks. It cannot walk on its own until it is 3 months old.

From a stick of butter like that, it grows into the black and white bear that any child in the world can recognize from far away. A grown male can weigh up to 113 kilograms. And once it stops nursing, it eats almost nothing but one thing.

Here the story turns unexpectedly familiar for anyone who knows Vietnam.

The Vietnamese name for the animal is gấu trúc. Gấu means bear, and the second word is one that Vietnamese people say every day. Trúc. It is the very same trúc of bamboo, in the same family as the bamboo hedge at the edge of a village, the thin clump of bamboo beside a water tank, the fishing rod and the carrying pole. Vietnamese and Chinese have shared this word for a very long time. On both sides it names that family of plants with hollow, jointed stems. In paintings, in carved wood and in embroidery, bamboo is also one of the four plants of the seasons: pine, chrysanthemum, bamboo and apricot blossom. There it stands for an upright, slender figure that bends in the wind but does not break.

The same family of plants. In a Vietnamese village, it is a fence, and a picture hung on the wall at Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. In the mountains of Sichuan, it is the whole of a meal, and the whole reason an animal still survives.

In the wet, misty bamboo at Wolong, the crack comes again from somewhere ahead, then again, steady and unbroken.

That dry, ordinary sound, heard closely, turns out to be the easiest sound in the forest to understand: an animal that has enough to eat.

As long as the cracking can be heard, the bamboo forest is still there.