BIRTHDAY EVENTS
The events in honor of birthday cubs Mei Lun and Mei Huan will take place over two days.
On Saturday, July 12, the twins will receive gift boxes at 11 a.m. Zoo visitors can enjoy cupcakes and special commemorative buttons (while supplies last) and can meet the giant panda mascot Zhu Zhu, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
On Tuesday, July 15, the cubs will be served their ice cakes at 10:45 a.m. At 2:30 p.m., panda fans around the world can tune in to a Google Hangout featuring panda keepers Jen Webb, Heather Roberts and Shauna Dankberg, talking live about the cubs.
Zoo Atlanta tickets: $16.99-$21.99 (the Google Hangout is free). 800 Cherokee Ave., Atlanta. 404-624-5600, zooatlanta.org/.
MORE FUN AT THE ZOO
There are non-panda activities happening at Zoo Atlanta in the next few months:
- Wild on the Rocks is the zoo's special night for young adults; it takes place the second Thursday of each month. The next installment, 6 p.m. Aug. 14, will offer specialty cocktails, live music, gourmet food and other amusements.
- The zoo is also promoting its new smartphone-based VIP pass, which can provide access to unique experiences, products, services and upgrades. VIPs use their mobile device to gain entry to the Ultimate Tiger Feeding, order a scooter, take a bird tour with the curator of birds or have a face-to-face gorilla encounter called the Personal Gorilla Experience. Customers register via their iPhone or Android, and purchase experiences on the same device. Each experience costs an additional charge, above admission to the zoo. Go to zooatlanta.org/vip on your phone (not your desktop or laptop) and register.
- The Jazzoo fundraiser, Sept. 13, features food from 30 Atlanta restaurants, live music and "creative" cocktail attire. Tickets are $175 but are available on Groupon for $125. 404-624-5600, zooatlanta.org.
The twin giant panda cubs at Zoo Atlanta are well on their way to giant-size, which is pretty impressive, considering they’ve gained 60 pounds apiece by drinking milk.
As the black-and-white bears approach their first birthday, Tuesday, July 15, Mei Lun and Mei Huan also have a giant-size fan club, which exceeds the physical bounds of the zoo.
The Panda Cam broadcasts their high jinks globally, and the bumptious young performers have not disappointed on screen.
Their wrestling, ear-biting and roughhousing make them an irresistible attraction. The hot weather kept them quieter on a recent morning, reducing their acrobatics to gentle snores, but their admirers online and on-site are many.
A “proud Pandaholic” Sheryl Weinbaum, of Farmington, Mich., will watch the twins online and chat with other fans through a Google Hangout being arranged on their birthday as a special treat. “Too bad I can’t be there in person, but I will enjoy it just the same!” she wrote recently on their Google Plus page.
While the twins’ birthday party will prompt chuckles, it also will bring sighs of relief. Each major milestone marked by the cubs brings greater security, and healthier prospects for adulthood.
Such an outcome was never a sure bet.
Panda twins rarely both survive in the wild, because the mother can usually only care for one cub at a time. With help and guidance from Deng Tao, a giant panda expert on loan from China, Zoo Atlanta caretakers learned how to trick mother Lun Lun into nursing both cubs. They switched the babies every hour, giving the hungry one to mom and putting the full one down for a nap.
It was a complicated, time-consuming regimen, requiring Deng to stay at the zoo 24 hours a day. Shifts of Atlanta caretakers also watched the babies around the clock.
The technique worked, and the cubs filled out like furry footballs, becoming the only surviving panda twins in the country.
These days Mei Lun and Mei Huan are mobile, independent and vaguely interested in solid food. Their nursing is supplemented with a small bottle of formula in the morning, which they hold themselves, just like a human baby might.
They are the fourth and fifth offspring of Lun Lun and Yang Yang, whose arrival at the zoo in 1999 has pushed annual zoo visitation ever closer to the 1 million mark. Lun Lun has been remarkably fertile, and has become an expert mother.
Her older offspring, Mei Lan, Xi Lan and Po, now make their homes in Sichuan, China, at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which will be the eventual destination for the twins as well. All of Zoo Atlanta’s pandas are on loan from China, including Lun Lun and Yang Yang’s offspring.
The Sichuan region is home to the last remaining habitat for this critically endangered species, and the Chengdu center is home to dozens of pandas.
Megan Wilson, curator of mammals at Zoo Atlanta, said the next benchmark for the cubs will occur at around 18 months, when they switch completely from nursing to solid food.
“We feel really good about how they’re doing now, about their health and development, but it will be great to see them consuming bamboo,” she said. “We’re not worried about it, but that will let us know that everything’s progressing as it should.”
On their birthdays, each twin will be treated to an ice cake, which is less indulgent than it sounds. Fruit, vegetables and bamboo are frozen inside the layers of ice for a confection that’s more colorful than sweet.
Mei Huan, who is younger by two minutes, is the more adventurous of the two cubs, so it is likely that she will be the first to destroy her treat.
While the cubs are still as friendly as ever, they’ve grown too big for keepers to interact with them casually. When they were younger, zoo staff weighed them every day. Now they are training the cubs to climb onto the scales themselves.
The pandas already know how to lift their paws for inspection and how to roll over. “They are learning their names, and learning to come when called,” Wilson said. All these skills will make interacting with the cubs much easier when they are 220-pound adults.
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