Keepers scurry in with syringes to collect precious drops from the ground when she is not looking.
“Quite often she is like, ‘I’m holding on to this,’” said Maclean. Females coming into heat have evolved to pee in ponds and streams, to alert potential mates, and although Tian Tian has been trained to urinate on command, she frequently refuses to comply. From mid-March onwards, Maclean and her team try to collect up to four samples a day, but this is a challenge. An important part of this surveillance is the analysis of hormones in Tian Tian’s urine.
“He came out and was just like, ‘Whoa!’ He was all over the place.”Īs in previous years, however, most of the keepers’ match-making work took the form of minute monitoring – of bamboo consumption, behaviour, daily photographs of Tian Tian’s vulva – to ensure everyone was primed for the big moment. “She spent a lot of time sniffing and seeing what was going on,” said Maclean. A few weeks earlier, Maclean had daubed urine from Long Hui, an impressive male panda kept at Schönbrunn zoo, in Vienna, all over Yang Guang and Tian Tian’s enclosures, in order to spice the air with competition and possibility. But the keepers had also come up with one or two new tricks. After a thoroughgoing review of these attempts in late 2014, this year’s season carried with it a sense of added pressure. Since the pandas’ arrival, the team at Edinburgh zoo had already tried three times to breed the bears – with considerable fanfare and public attention – and each attempt had ended in disappointment. “We thought, this was quite good,” said Maclean, “quite interactive, quite nice.” Seeing Tian Tian through the bars, Yang Guang, who had spent the afternoon sitting on top of a cave, eating, called back. The only exception to this is the breeding season, when the bears are invited to communicate and are ultimately, according to the euphemism, “introduced”. Having evolved to lead solitary lives, pandas are kept in separate enclosures in zoos, to prevent them from killing one another. On the screen, Maclean watched Tian Tian approach the grate and continue her calls. “We are always worried that we are going to miss the window.” “The signs can be very subtle,” Simon Girling, Edinburgh zoo’s head vet, told me. Depending on the vagaries of climate, diet and bear, the build-up to this moment can be conspicuous and last for weeks, or it can arrive suddenly, with no warning at all. The optimum window for them to mate – “the drop zone” in zoo parlance – is about 24 hours long. Late March is right in the middle of the short, fragile and confusing period that is the panda breeding season. When she stood up and wandered over to a pale green grate that separates her enclosure from Yang Guang’s, Maclean, who was sitting in her office a few hundred yards away, followed her on one of 16 cameras that monitor the bears day and night. That afternoon, as they prepared to leave for the day, the panda team at the zoo was watching Tian Tian especially closely. “You have to be very, very careful around her.” “She has got her own mind, most definitely,” said Alison Maclean, the chief panda keeper at Edinburgh zoo, who seems to love her deeply for precisely this reason. Tian Tian has bullied keepers off the job, and sometimes takes sly swipes with her enormous claws at passing vets. Sometimes she hangs from the bars on the top of her indoor den – a pose that her handlers call “ninja panda” – just for the hell of it. Tian Tian, on the other hand, has been known to skip after balls and do forward rolls. If you give Yang Guang a ball, he will most likely see if he can eat it, then let it go. They do everything they can to avoid unnecessary exertion. They subsist almost entirely on bamboo, which they digest poorly. Pandas are vegetarian bears with slow metabolisms. Yang Guang, whose name means “Sunshine”, might be a larger and, to all appearances, more affable creature, but Tian Tian (“Sweetie”) is a panda with more edge, more wit and more dash. Tian Tian, who was born in Beijing zoo in 2003, has proved a terrific hit with visitors since she arrived in Britain with the zoo’s male panda, Yang Guang, in December 2011. A t about 5pm on 25 March, a cold, wet Wednesday earlier this year, Tian Tian, the female giant panda at Edinburgh zoo, stirred from the wooden platform in her outdoor enclosure and began to bleat.
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