According to a story told in China, the giant panda was once all white. Then one day a little girl saw a panda being attacked by a leopard. The girl tried to rescue the panda, but the leopard leaped on her and killed her. The panda escaped but was filled with grief for the girl, and he summoned all the world's pandas to come to her funeral. The sorrowing pandas wore black arm bands, hugged their bodies for consolation, and pressed their arms against their ears to muffle the cries of the mourning. The color from their arm bands dyed their fur, and ever afterward pandas have had black eye patches, ears, arms, and legs and a black band across their shoulders.
These strikingly patterned and dearly loved pandas are now an endangered species. Fossil evidence indicates that the giant panda has been on earth for three million years and once lived in much of eastern China and Burma. The panda's range increased and decreased periodically as climatic conditions changed, but since the mid-1800's it has shrunk dramatically. For many years people living in panda habitat hunted them, and even today pandas are accidentally killed in snares set for musk deer. In 1962, the Chinese government banned all panda hunting, and now the species is considered a national treasure that must be helped rather than harmed. The penalty for killing a panda even unintentionally is a two-year jail sentence.
Despite its protected status, the giant panda, among the best loved of all mammals, is now among the rarest; estimates of its numbers hover around 1,000. The species faces several threats. One is the natural periodic die-off of bamboo. Because the phenomenon has occurred for millennia, it is obvious the panda has always been able to compensate for temporary losses. If one or even several bamboo species flowered in an area, individual pandas could find alternate food sources by moving to other parts of their range. Today that option has all but...