Rangers dedicate lives to pandas they may never see

For nearly a decade, conservationist and giant panda researcher Fu Mingxia has dedicated her life to an animal she has never actually seen in the wild.

Working at the Yingjing management station in Sichuan province's Daxiangling mountain range — a more than 6,000-square-kilometer area twice the size of Yosemite National Park — Fu and her team must rely on the subtle traces the rare animals leave behind.

According to national survey data from 2015, Daxiangling is home to 38 giant pandas.

In a neighboring section of the Giant Panda National Park, which extends into Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, only two of the 12 staff there have ever seen a giant panda in the wild.

Yet Fu's team regularly celebrates what many would consider an odd victory — a fresh pile of spindle-shaped, green-tinged droppings along a mountain trail.

In the early days of her career, which began fresh out of university in 2017, finding these bamboo-fiber traces was a thrilling confirmation of life. Today, it is a routine confirmation of an ecological success.

Fu and her colleagues are convinced that the local ecology has improved significantly in recent years, creating a more hospitable environment not just for giant pandas, but for a wide variety of other wildlife as well.

One visible sign is the increasing frequency of panda droppings along the trails.

Another indicator comes from a network of surveillance cameras installed throughout the forest as the number of images captured has risen steadily, featuring not only pandas but also tufted deer, Lady Amherst's pheasants and other wild animals.

"By 9 am today, our cameras had already recorded 72 detections of mammals and 12 of birds," Fu said in a recent interview. "Since the surveillance network was put into use in October, we have captured over 1,200 video clips or images of giant pandas, including footage of them feeding on bamboo shoots and leading cubs in the wild."