"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.

Cookies, Pale Bridges and Baby

I'm out of hit points, stamina, low on mana. My diurnal other half finds me waking up late on the couch and going to sleep early in the floor, time passing without balance— avoiding people when I can. Though some of my behavior unveils itself only for winter, it's also my "chronotype", as Till Roenneberg suggests. Unfortunately, I'm nocturnal. I am meant to creep around in the darkness.

Alligators are also mostly nocturnal. They do their hunting around dusk. I'm reading a lot of suggestions online that warn to keep a flashlight near if you live in an area with alligators. Do people scan for flashes of yellow alligator eyes floating along bodies of water? It sounds magnificent, just scary enough.

Alligators are swimming along disguised as logs in order to sneak up on some meat. I'm creeping around the house hoping not to step on a groaning floorboard in order to sneak up on a crunchy cookie or two or seventeen. I'd like to share a cookie with the gator. Chocolate chip. Maybe peanut butter. I wonder if he would appreciate the crumbly sugar. More likely than not he'd probably just eat me instead, and that's no problem. Chances are there's a really good mincemeat pie recipe calling for actual meat, or I could be one of those vogue cooks who throws bacon on a sweet scoop of vanilla ice cream to make it "edgy." He might like that.

The point is, neither of us have self control. Be it drugs, cookies, the works, we are predators.

I'm at the zoo again.

I pick the right path this time.

Over the barricades.

At the bridge.

The snow is light today. It fluffs up like powder bunched together at the face of my boots. I pace back and forth on the bridge. The cables of the bridge are dusted, just like the ropes, rails and rods. And the rocks. The would-be small river. This living space for this alligator is so so small. Otis's rock looks like a tiny naked Oreo suspended on a small cloud of milk. Cooookie.

I'm not a solitary television watcher, but China made me a lonely enough person to get into it. The snow today reminds me of all those skin product commercials in Handan. Skin like milk, the commercials would say. Get the skin of an egg white in two short weeks, they'd say, gallons of white liquid pouring against a pale sky blue backdrop. They'd advertise products for skin-whitening with models white like a bleached corpse. But this is the culture there, a culture we used to follow. Though it's not like we're better now. We've got orange paste and bronze makeup to create the darkening effect. Paleness is beauty when it means we don't have to work hard outdoors. Tan is beautiful when it means we don't have to work hard indoors. Keeping a dream in mind, maybe soon every color will be the new beauty.

Skin is whack.

The tracks from one side of the bridge and the other look like a couple four-wheelers have passed through. It looks like a lot of people have come through, but today nobody has broken the rules but me.

They are my tracks.

I'd paced back and forth, thinking about getting the best view of Otis's home, thinking about Chinese values, thinking about being tired of thinking, but really, I'm just trying to get over this bridge. The bridge of my life, the bridge of not finding my alligator, the bridge of you-name-it.


Before I left the zoo, I decided I ought to ask the visitor's office where they'd taken Otis.

"This is probably a strange question, but do you happen to know where the alligator is?"
"Which one? The baby or-"

Which one? The baby?

"Um, Otis."
"Oh, he's being held in a separate commissary. Off exhibit."

The use of the phrase "being held" made me think along the lines of "what are you in for?" I appreciate this explanation, intentional or not. In Otis's apparent prison, I'm sure he was feeling a little less than energized. No sunlight to speed up his coldblooded metabolism. Nowhere to make tracks. No bridges to cross.

And a baby?

I didn't even want to think about what a "separate commissary" looked like. How could his winter space be any less elaborate than the gator bathtub on exhibit?