I went to the National Zoo last week to say goodbye to Bei Bei. For four years, the charismatic panda cub has regaled Washington at morning appearances—somersaulting down his yard, splashing in a tub, foraging in a hide-and-seek game to find toys filled with fruit, playing on a hammock crafted from old fire hoses, and scampering high up his favorite tree. As he grew, the limbs couldn’t always hold him, so he’d plummet to the earth, to gasps from the crowds. Unlike the zoo’s previous cub, a delicate and independent girl named Bao Bao, Bei Bei is the seeming Winnie-the-Pooh of pandas—curious, engaging, playful, and ever in search of something sweet. “He’s a classic rough-and-tumble little boy,” Brandie Smith, the zoo’s deputy director and a former panda curator, told me. “He’s a little tank.”
When Bei Bei was smaller, he learned to pull over a bucket, climb on top, and slide open the small window of his indoor enclosure. “He loves interaction with keepers, and when they were outside he wanted to see them and what was going on,” Smith recounted. The zoo has it on tape, as part of its groundbreaking work on panda behavior. “It was cognitive work. He used a tool,” she said. “Pandas are actually very smart. They’re just very mellow.” The black-and-white bears are distinguishable by their markings. Bei Bei’s mother, Mei Xiang, looks like she’s wearing hip-high black stockings. His father, Tian Tian, looks like he’s sporting black knee socks. Bei Bei’s most distinguishing marks are the black patches around his eyes—they are in the shape of an angel’s wings.
On Tuesday, Bei Bei was packed in a crate for a sixteen-hour flight, aboard FedEx’s Panda Express (with Bei Bei’s face plastered across the Boeing 777), bound for China. He’s leaving the zoo forever. Bei Bei’s departure is wrenching for many in this politically embattled city. The zoo has long been one of Washington’s few (and free) apolitical refuges, rivalled only by the fleeting cherry blossoms. For weeks, updates on Bei Bei’s final days in Washington have made daily news, with a hashtag, #ByeByeBeiBei, on Twitter. I arrived at the zoo six minutes after it opened, and its three parking lots were already full. Hundreds turned out daily to get a final glimpse. The woman standing next to me had flown in from Texas to say goodbye. She had followed Bei Bei on the zoo’s panda cams, which provide live coverage of the pandas on the Internet.
The endearing young panda is probably the zoo’s last cub for the foreseeable future; his mother, at twenty-one, has reached the age of panda menopause. (The zoo’s only other mama panda died at twenty-three.) His exit ends, for now, a breeding program pioneered at the National Zoo and dating back almost a half century. As part of its research, the zoo established a genetic algorithm for breeding. “It’s an eHarmony for endangered species,” the zoo’s director, Steven Monfort, told me. Monfort’s first job at the zoo, three decades ago, was tracking the hormones of pandas. He was the first to know the brief window—once a year, for only one to three days—when the female was ovulating. Among endangered and vulnerable species, inbreeding is one of the final phases of extinction. Bei Bei is going to China to diversify the gene pool. There are fewer than two thousand pandas left in the wild. The zoo’s algorithm will help determine his future mate among the five hundred pandas in China’s forty nature reserves and research centers. Bei Bei is going to Bifengxia, in southwestern China.
Washington’s pandas are now the most famous in the world—known and covered like no others, Monfort claimed. A video of Bei Bei’s first steps garnered more than three hundred thousand views on YouTube; a twenty-six-second clip of his first sneeze had more than seventy thousand views. Last year, the BBC covered Bei Bei tumbling through the first snow in Washington. The French media covered his birthday party, with a giant fruitsicle cake, in August. During the government shutdown, in January, the networks provided major coverage of the federally funded zoo being forced to turn off its panda cams.
America’s connection with giant pandas began almost by accident. In February, 1972, during President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, First Lady Pat Nixon made small talk at dinner with Premier Zhou Enlai. She mentioned her fascination with the giant pandas that she had just visited at the Beijing Zoo. The Nixon trip was the first diplomatic thaw between the United States and China since the 1949 Communist revolution, so Zhou seized the moment. “I’ll give you some,” he replied.
Among the Nixon tapes—the last set of Presidential conversations recorded by any Administration—is the President’s leak to a journalist about their impending arrival, complete with his reflections on panda sex. The problem with pandas, Nixon told Crosby Noyes, the foreign editor of the Washington Star, “is that they don’t know how to mate. The only way they learn how is to watch other pandas mate. And so they’re keeping them there a little while—these are younger ones—to sort of learn, you know, how it’s done. Now, if they don’t learn it, they’ll get over here and nothing will happen, so I just thought you should have your best reporter out there to see whether these pandas have learned.”
Two months after her offhand comment, Mrs. Nixon welcomed Ling-Ling (“Darling Girl,” in Chinese) and Hsing-Hsing (“Twinkling Star”) to the zoo. Standing with a Chinese delegation, whose members still dressed in those days in quilted Mao jackets, she expressed appreciation for the bears, “which all children, whatever age, will enjoy, and I include myself in that category.” The President later telephoned his wife to see how it went. “Do you pet them?” Nixon asked. “Or they don’t allow that? How does it work?” Their quarters were behind glass, the First Lady explained. “They’re comic little things.”
The panda pair quickly became fixtures in Washington and symbols of international diplomacy. The next Sunday, seventy-five thousand people waited in a line that snaked a quarter-mile to see them. They later produced five cubs, some naturally and some with scientific help, but none survived more than a few days. During their lifetimes, Washington’s first pandas nevertheless drew an estimated seventy-five million visitors. The Times ran obituaries when each died—Ling-Ling, of heart failure, in 1992, and Hsing-Hsing, who was euthanized, in 1999, when he was nearly blind, deeply arthritic, and had irreversible kidney disease. Each time, Washington mourned; the zoo was inundated with condolence letters.
Almost every Administration since then has engaged with pandas. During a trip to China, Jimmy Carter lobbied for a pair of pandas for the Atlanta Zoo, in Georgia, his home state. In 1984, Nancy Reagan appeared outside the zoo’s Panda House to appeal to American children to contribute to the “pennies for pandas” emergency fund during a severe shortage of bamboo, the staple food for pandas, in China. (Pandas eat between twenty and forty pounds of bamboo every day.) She carried the proceeds to China during President Ronald Reagan’s trip that year. In 2016, the headline of her obituary in the China Daily read, “Nancy Reagan Remembered as Panda Savior.”
The current pair of pandas arrived in 2000—a year after Hsing-Hsing died—near the end of the Clinton Administration. In April of this year, Chelsea Clinton launched her book “Don’t Let Them Disappear: 12 Endangered Species Across the Globe,” at the zoo. A panda is on the cover. She tweeted, “So excited to be @NationalZoo tomorrow for multiple events & to say hi to the giant pandas again - a favorite stop with my grandmother whenever we would come to the zoo together!” At the zoo in 2015, Michelle Obama and China’s First Lady, Peng Liyuan, jointly unfurled a banner announcing Bei Bei’s name at the traditional hundred-day naming ceremony. Malia Obama also had internships at the zoo.
Unlike Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, who were gifts, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian are only on loan from China—at a cost of ten million dollars for the first ten years and half a million a year for the second decade. The zoo’s panda program has been heavily reliant on donations to cover costs. The loan agreement expires next year. Two pandas at the San Diego Zoo were returned to China in May, after the zoo’s loan agreement ended. There are multiple reports—still rumors, the National Zoo insists—that China intends to significantly hike the price of any new panda agreement, and that the pandas could even get caught up in the troubled trade talks between Washington and Beijing.
The loss of pandas at the National Zoo would be a setback for international conservation efforts. For Washingtonians, it is almost inconceivable—although so much of what is happening in the nation’s capital these days is, too.
One of the first pictures I took of Bei Bei was of him cuddling a red ball. It has remained his favorite toy. On his flight to China, he was accompanied by one of his keepers, a veterinarian, and sixty-six pounds of bamboo, two pounds of apples and pears, two pounds of cooked sweet potatoes, and two bags of leaf-eater biscuits. The zoo also packed his red ball. All I have left is that picture.
