Looking for Traces of Pandas
During the Spring Festival of 1989, it was heavily snowing, with high winds whistling around. Big snowflakes were falling everywhere aimlessly, just like scattered cotton fibre. After breakfast, I set off from our encampment in the open country at the altitude of 3000 metres, together with a researcher on pandas. We carried our baggage and headed towards higher mountains, looking for the traces of pandas.
I took with me two Nikon FE2 bodies, a 200 -600 mm lens, a 80-200 zoom lens, a 35mm Nikon lens, a Canon automatic camera , a tripod, a unipod, a telescope, some matches, as well as solid food enough for one meal. We also took daggers, knives and other weapons for defensive usage. All these stuffs amounted to about 20 kilograms. We trudged through the knee – deep snow on mountains at the altitude of above 3000 metres, with special-made big mountaineering boots as heavy as 5 kilograms on our feet! High winds howled in the forest, chased the snowflakes here and there, and disturbed the tranquility of the forest. Walking in the virgin forest was quite difficult, indeed. Now, with heavy snow covered everywhere, the original landscape became impossible for us to identify. One false step could lead to great dangers. We followed footprints of wild animals and walked length by length with great care. Branches bent and moaned in the great force of winds. Actually, everything bent, crouched, trembled and groaned. I walked in front, in order to take pictures. We kept alarm all the time. We needed to be extremely observant and alert. When detecting anything unusual, we usually first listened to the sounds made by a certain animal, and then distinguished the species of the animal and how far away it was from us through the direction and intensity of the sounds. In the meantime, we should slow down our steps immediately and minimize noises made by our movement in order not to scare away those animals. That was because there were very few wild animals in the virgin forest of high mountains. Animals living in such surroundings were usually very susceptible, and would flee when they found anything unusual. Thus we would often hear their sounds without seeing them, not to mention taking any pictures of them. The virgin forest was full of shrubs, ruderals twisting with ripraps, and lianes climbing up trees, which made our journey much more difficult. There were actually no paths at all. Thus we must cut down shrubberies, bamboos and ruderals to make our way ahead. Before long, our heads and shoulders were all wet with snow fallen from trees. The winds howled angrily, letting out all the energy it had. Snowballs beat us like hailstones. Several tall larches shook their branches severely, as if cravenly telling their misfortune. We measured, registered, and collected animal footprints as well as dung along the way. As we got higher and higher, it became more and more difficult to step ahead. Although it was snowy winter, we were both soaked with sweat. And as the cold wind blew, we trembled all over.
Next story : Discovering a panda