"Summer" Xia, Red Panda

(Probably making a sound effect somewhere along the lines of "nyum nyum nyum.")

Remember this stuff from a couple entries ago?

I listed nearly a hundred grasses I knew were NOT this plant.

Since people are walking around, since Pittsburgh is waking up to spring and at the zoo some more people are interested again, or at least about the twenty folks I've seen today are, I ended up asking someone, an old man dressed in a black sweatsuit, what the "funeral flower" was. I hold one stereotype very strong- that old people are so much smarter about the natural world. Maybe because my other stereotype is people my age grew up with too much televisions and video-games or whatever, but that's an aside. How silly now, of me to think it was a funeral flower or some kind of grass. I never realized this: bamboo grows in two forms.

There are of course the woody bamboos I know about. This is the kind I imagine the pandas and red pandas and those weird lemurs are munching on. Animals like rats will eat the fruits that come out of bamboos and mountain gorillas, chimps and elephants will eat it as well, and receive an effect from the fermented sap as a sort of animal alcohol. Drink up, fellers. Also bug larvae will eat this and the caterpillars which eat the sap are considered a local delicacy in Thailand and some parts of China. This further supports my argument that bugs are delicious and should be eaten with a smile.

Anyway, the smaller, softer "harbaceous bamboos" are known as "olyreae." This is what the plant is and it is strange that the more popular wood-like bamboo has been the only bamboo in my mind. At least the red panda knows better.

The first time I ever saw a red panda I thought for sure it must be a red-headed relative to the raccoon. They wear a white bandit mask of fur and use their long bushy striped tails to balance. They've got claws and look a little bit like cats in the face, with their whiskers and sharp teeth. And if they got the chance, they'd probably eat garbage, too. 

However, these animals are not raccoons. They have been classified as ailuridae, a complicated and debated species classification only given to these special animals, all of the like-species ailuridae extinct. For a small summation of the information I've found about the species, check out this wiki.

As you can see, Xia, delivered to Pittsburgh, PA from a zoo in North Dakota, paces without stopping, at least for the twenty minutes we watched her. Even watching her movement made us a little dizzy. I immediately thought of earlier in this blog project, when I caught a polar bear pacing back and forth, shaking her head to and fro and wiggling to a silent samba. I thought of the tigers pacing back and forth, a roller coaster of grunts and groans over the same mounds of land they'd seen for all of their captive life. For as long as I can remember, I've seen animals pacing at zoos. I've assumed it meant the same thing it does in human beings: boredom, anxiety, unhappiness.  So I took a step further and searched online to figure out the pacing.

Blogs on pacing:

"Abnormal behaviour such as a stereotypic movement is very much a concern when it occurs in relation to animals held in captivity. From a behavioural standpoint, the behavioural and spatial requirements of nondomestic animals in captivity greatly depends on the species."

"Despite this, red pandas do adapt well in captivity, and they are found in zoos worldwide. Many Carnivores (order Carnivora, not ‘things that eat meat’) traditionally do very poorly in zoos; just think of a polar bear pacing back and forth repetitively in its enclosure. Red pandas, however seem to do just fine, which is a good thing for them because captive breeding programs can go a long way to restoring and maintaining the native population."
(Refer to my video in rebuttal to the second excerpt)

And I also found this, from the website of the Born Free Foundation, a wildlife charity dedicated to protecting animals:

"If the captive environment does not cater for the species-specific needs of the animal, there can be a deterioration in both physical and mental health such as the development of abnormal behaviour, disease and even early mortality...
Pacing and Circling:

Continuous walking back and forth or in a circle, following the same path. Signs of regular pacing include definite paths worn in the ground. Seen in many captive animals, especially big cats and canids (eg wolves)."

It's not the scientific proof I was hoping to find, but it reinforces that pacing is pacing, regardless of which mammal we are. I knew the pacing of human beings and I knew that this was a bad thing, just by the human experience and relating that to the animal experience. I knew this from realizing we are the same. Pacing is sometimes like searching for understanding- it can be really frustrating and lead to nowhere. And yet, we keep moving forward, trying the same path to notice something that might not have been so lucid the first couple of rounds. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I find my wallet after looking in the same spots for hours. Sometimes it doesn't help. But let's try to figure out how Xia came to be "Xia."

Xia is the red panda's name given by the zoo in North Dakota. She is almost three years old now. Sun, my friend from Handan, China, has taught me a lot about understanding the way Chinese names and symbols are formed.

夏[Xià] is a mixture of radicals. The two radicals are:

𦣻 [Shǒu] from the archaic symbol    for "head." To me, it looks like the head of a dog.

and
夂 [Zhǐ] for the archaic symbol   for "a man who makes an effort." They look like axes or clubs, some sort of tool.

Chinese mythology tells the story that there were ten suns in the sky, rambunctious brothers who made the world too hot with all their antics. Nothing could grow with all that hot air. So Hou Yi, a Robin Hood-like hero, shot down nine of the ten brothers, therein allowing the Earth to grow plants and survive with the heat of the surviving brother. To add to the mysteries of the sun, an eclipse was explained with stories of a magical dog of heaven biting a piece of the sun. So of course, as I continue to learn we've always been this way, human beings would yell and holler, making lots of noise to scare the magical dog away and end the eclipse.

We always think we're the heroes. That we're solving problems. That we can solve the problems. That the red panda's population is down to 250,000 in the wild so we should keep them and make them safe, safe from the destruction most likely we have caused. We label things. We make it so. And maybe it does make a difference. I'm not an expert and have no plans to be. 

Working together with the meanings of a "head" to ward away and the "hard work of man," the Chinese, through years of history, came to the meaning for Xia, or 夏, as the character for "summer." The red panda's name in English is "Summer," or Chinese for summer/great/grand/or big. 

The weather feels like it's restless, much in the way that Xia is. Pacing. The weather goes back and forth, cold and hot, undecided on whether the plants will live. One day the weather is 30°, the next it's 70°. Hou Yi has done his work to make sure it doesn't get too hot down here, but the weather is still restless, so do something humans. The weather is restless, like the insomniac battle I work through during the week, sleeping for only a handful of hours during the week. Almost every Friday is spent in sleep debt remittance, usually snoozing from 4pm to 9am the next morning. It'd be nice to find a balance, to figure out how spring will wake up from the sheets of snow and bring life into the bamboo for Summer to eat. I want this eclipse of bad weather to be over with, to be another thing of memory, to not seem so bad after all, in retrospect.

So what, in the end, should we do to fix everything?

Maybe make some noise for summer, everyone.

In A Whipray Name

More people come to the zoo in warmer weather. As the ice thaws, as molecules begin to move, people begin to move. In fluid motions, they drip along the sidewalk, they find their way through the zoo to the opening exhibits.

At the visitor's center

They've told me

Otis will be free

In a couple weeks

As I was researching for today's topic, I found the creepier side of the zoo:

http://blog.pittsburghzoo.org/

Webcams. The invasion of privacy. Animals are being watched not only in person, but through technology. Big Brother. The age of surveillance and numbers.

When I was flying and being screwed over for even thinking of flying this past week, I kept thinking about what an awful experience it is. How it feels so unnatural. How the air is stale and while flying I feel a cold dry sweat on the plane. My right ear is slow to pop and I can barely hear anyone out of that side for a day after the flight. But really, what is flying and what makes it such a pain?

1. Flying is a form of checking for citizenship.

Why do we accept spending money on something so expensive? Why is flying rather than taking a bus, or should I say, why is high speed travel any different from an automobile? It is a chance for someone to look at your ID, it is a chance to filter illegal immigrants. Border control. Air control. Controlling everything. Why are we okay with being rubbed down, patted down, and asked if we like to take things from strangers?

2. If your flight leaves without you, it is very often your fault.

Two minutes to run to the terminal in a connecting flight? A physically impossible feat to breach? Your fault. A flight leaving early for a reason unprovided by your air carrier? Your fault. "You'll be able to get a hotel voucher when you arrive in Salt Lake City." Upon arrival to Salt Lake City, the terminal is closed. No one to ask to get a hotel voucher, no promised accommodations given. Your fault. So stubborn you sleep in the airport anyway. I person waxing the floor asks you to sit up so he can wax underneath your feet.

3. Being identified as a number.

This one's pretty familiar to me. Undergraduate college, for one. Nearly everything. As well as when I wrote prisoners at the Appalachian Prison Book Project. I always felt deep regret at the inmates who didn't write their ID number when requesting a book. Their name is nothing to our society within those walls. They are accounted for by their number, and while I personally only have to think of being a number lately in terms of air-flight, I feel a remnant of that feeling of insignificance.


Flying is a demeaning, abusive thing, and I'm late in starting to understand what fresh air really means. What sea salt and the smell of an aquarium, that salty, algae, green smell, can do for me. I feel alive. I feel happy. I feel like nobody can keep me from walking around, from trapping anyone just as they did every time we landed.

I'm looking at the hands-on exhibit of the white-blotched River Stingray and a Leopard Whipray.

This animal is another favorite of mine, and I'm not sure why. I remember these animals being feared after the 2006 death of Steve Irwin, and while I do think that it's so sad for a man who respected the research and discovery animals so much to die at the stinger of one, (as if I need to remind you of what I think) there's nothing malicious in an animal defending itself.

The de-stingered animal is soft, slimy. A little "nasty" to touch, as my friend says. As visitors touch this beautiful animal, as this is a thing the zoo has allowed, I wonder how it really feels to the animal (and I will return when I have some more time and ask an attendant what this happens). I wonder why this is a thing at all, to be rubbed down in front of an audience. To be patted down. Is it invasive or welcomed?

***

A little kid climbs under the built-in tunnel and pops his head through the looking glass. The human as a stingray. To be pet as a stingray. Is the whipray watching us or are we watching it? The leopard print it beautiful, meaningful, like every little spot is a center to another universe. It doesn't have a name posted anywhere. There is nothing posted on the internet about either animal's name, nothing that I can find even as I am internet-technology-born.

Have they simply become numbers?