Onto the final area of pandas at the Dujiangyan Panda Base, it’s the Diequan Garden which is the furthest-most area at the back of the base. Here the map shows 9 yards, but actually 3 are almost completely unable to be viewed (although I did spot a panda in 2 of them from super far away, just not entirely sure who they were) – so 6 yards to see, with a total of 11 pandas across them. 2 yards were mothers with 2023-born cubs, 2 yards were pairs of sub-adult pandas, and 2 yards were solo pandas. First up in this post, the solo pandas:
Zhu Ling 竹灵
The first panda I saw in the Diequan Garden was Zhu Ling 竹灵 – she’s female and was born in 2007 making her 17 years old. And as far as I’m aware, this is the first time I’m seeing her. She was born in Wolong and moved to Ya’an shortly after the 2008 earthquake. Then she spent many years living in the Liugongdao Park in Weihai, Shandong Province, and was there from 2010 until at least 2018 (as that’s the year I have the studbook until). There isn’t a lot of information about her online, however one fun fact, she was featured, alongside her twin and their mother in the 2009 Disney movie, Trail of the Panda. Their mother, Gong Zhu, was born in 1998 and was one of the early successful births of the captive breeding programme, and has gone on to have a number of cubs – one of her other cubs, so Zhu Ling‘s half sister, is Wu Wen who lives in the Netherlands at Ouwehands Dierenpark.
Zhu Ling was quite active for most of the day, she was walking around first thing , then I saw her settled with bamboo at lunch time. In the afternoon she was resting up on one of her platforms, but was awake and kept shuffling round to new positions. I saw her up and about again later in the afternoon.
Su Yang 苏阳
Su Yang 苏阳 was the other solo panda I saw in the Diequan Garden, and actually he was living here last year on my visit too, but didn’t come outside at all – he was so active and outside a lot on this visit, so that was great to see. He was a lovely panda to watch, and actually it was generally pretty quiet at his viewing so I had a great time taking advantage of that (he was opposite a mum+cubs, so people gravitated towards them more). He is still quite a young panda, being 5 years old on my visit – as a youngster he used to live with Nong Nong (seen on this visit also) and E Mei (seen on last years visit). His mum is Su Lin, who I also saw last year and this year with her 2023-born cubs, but he was raised by Shui Xiu, who I also saw last year as well.
He was very active for the whole day – I only saw him eating bamboo for a little bit of time but otherwise he was very interested in his neighbour (Xin Xin and her 2023-born cub) through a little grate in the wall between their yards. He was almost constantly going over to sniff around it, look through it, and scent mark the wall next to it. Then he would go and scent mark the wall of his indoor space. Even though it was early in the season, and he’s still young for a male, it was great to see these behaviours – his handstands were looking great and maybe in the future he will make a great natural breeder.
