Panda brings pleasant surprise to villagers

Residents of a village in Wenchuan county in Sichuan province were building a road on Thursday morning when they saw a female panda approaching them.

Unafraid of humans, the 11-year-old took a leisure stroll in Jinbo village in the county's Miansi town.

"It climbed into the bucket of a loading machine used for building the road and visited a villager's vegetable garden where it stepped on corn and pepper and pushed down six beehives," said villager Yin Shihua.

As it is rare to see a panda in the village, villagers stopped their road-building project and followed it. They did not come in the way of panda because the animal is national treasure, Yin said.

Workers from China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda headquartered in the county arrived at the scene at midday to lure the panda into a cage with food.

Instead, it climbed onto a tree. Workers had to use a tranquilizer gun before caging it.

According to center’s chief executive Zhang Hemin, it was one of four female pandas sent into wild this year to mate with male pandas in the wild.

The purpose is to achieve genetic diversity of captive pandas, he said.

In 2017, his center experimented with the release of Cao Cao, a 16-year-old female panda, into the wild to mate with a male in the wild.

Cao Cao did mate in the wild in March last year and gave birth to a male cub four months later.