Second up in the Diequan Garden area, one of the pairs of subadult pandas, it’s Bao Yuan 宝元 and Mao Mao 茅茅. A very cutie pair of 2021-born pandas living in a yard that, to be honest, I hadn’t really noticed or seen before. It’s also quite different to the other yards at this base in particular because the only viewing here is completely through glass, whereas all the other yards are viewed glass-free. However, I had almost no issues with reflections on the glass and was still able to get lots of great pictures of this pair!
This yard didn’t have any signage up on what pandas were living here – luckily the Singaporean fan who I met at Le Le‘s yard helped me out with identifying these two as Bao Yuan and Mao Mao. This is another ‘it’s a small panda world’ story, because Bao Yuan is the twin of Bao Li, who I saw last year at Wolong Shenshuping and who now lives at Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington DC. Bao Yuan and Bao Li‘s mother is of course Bao Bao (born in 2013 at Smithsonian National Zoo), and along with Mao Mao, whose mother is Shui Xiu (next small world moment, she also raised Su Yang who was just featured in the last post), they were born on 4th August 2021. Bao Yuan was reared by experienced mum Shui Xiu alongside Mao Mao (both are males), so these two have lived their whole life together.
These two spent almost the whole day eating bamboo right at the front of the window. There was a short period where I spotted them having a mid-day nap right at the back of the yard, but otherwise they spent the rest of the time eating right at the eye of the public. The ground level of the yard is where the base of the window starts, so the pandas really can be eye-to-eye with whoever is viewing them. When I first walked up, I was the only person watching them, but then a small group of others came over. It never really got too busy, and I was always able to see them when I was there, and was able to navigate the right angle with the window to get the photos I wanted. These two almost seemed like they were posing and knew their best angles, I really didn’t get a bad photo of them at all XD They’re so cute and have particularly fluffy faces. I loved watching them and hope I can see both of them again on a future visit.
