A definite highlight of my visit (and I think of the few thousand people who also passed by that day) to the Chengdu Panda Base was being at the Moonlight Nursery and seeing cubs all playing and interacting together! It’s been so long since I’ve seen this, since 2019! When I visited in 2023 it was September and both too hot and the cubs were too young to be out together yet, and when I visited in 2024 it was May, so also very hot but there were no group houses for the cubs then. I did see a pair of cubs in the Star Nursery, but they were inside and quite far away so it definitely wasn’t the same experience.
It was serious panda cub craziness at this area, there must have been a good several hundred people here at any one time trying to catch a glimpse of the cuteness that is baby pandas playing together^ The path isn’t the widest, but there is a ledge at the back which you can stand on and the security guards don’t stop you from doing that, so it’s a good option, and actually I found viewing not too bad despite all the people. I was still able to get in and get plenty of pictures on both days. I did only visit in the mornings, between 10AM and 12PM and this was a pretty good time for activity, although I suspect was also a peak-viewing time as well. The miniapp for the base in WeChat does have a ‘busy-ness’ indicator on it at each panda house, to be honest I didn’t really use this, but it might help if you want to avoid crowds if possible.
On both days there were four 2024-born cubs out – because I saw different mothers with cubs in the next yard over on both the days, I suspect I didn’t see all four of the same cubs and that they are rotated round depending on who else is out. I also saw a few of the mothers living separately but also in the Moonlight Nursery, so they will likely be the mothers of the cubs that I saw.
Anyway, all the cubs were super cute and played both individually and together, and I saw one go down the slide, so life might be complete now XD On the first day of my visit one of the cubs spent the whole time up a tree that looked very thin with branches not made to hold a growing cub, several times it looked like it was going to fall out and the whole crowd was gasping then cheering when it managed to get back onto a more stable branch. The second day of my visit, I think the tree looked like they had taken a number of branches off, so I guess it was looking too dangerous/tempting for a cub^ So, onto the pictures!
