Camp Panda: Helping Cubs Return to the Wild

By Catherine Thimmesh

Robert F. Sibert Honor Award winner

"Complementing Thimmesh's thoughtful, engagingly written text are many arrestingly adorable color photographs of pandas in training and in the wild. A timely, uplifting story." —Kirkus, starred review

From the Sibert medal–winning author of Team Moon and the bestselling Girls Think of Everything comes a riveting, timely account of panda conservation efforts in China, perfect for budding environmentalists and activists.

Roughly a thousand years ago, an estimated 23,000 pandas roamed wild and free through their native China. But within the past forty years, more than fifty percent of the panda’s already shrinking habitat has been destroyed by humans, leaving the beautiful and beloved giant panda vulnerable to extinction.

Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds—poaching, habitat destruction, pollution, human overpopulation, and global climate change—the panda is making a comeback. How? By humans teaching baby pandas how to be wild and stay wild.

• Chicago Public Library Best of the Year
• Kirkus Best Book of the Year
• Junior Library Guild Selection

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781328476654

Catherine Thimmesh

Catherine Thimmesh is the award-winning author of many books for children, including Girls Think of Everything and Team Moon, winner of the Sibert Medal. Her books have received numerous starred reviews, appeared on best books lists, and won many awards, including the IRA Children's Book Award and Minnesota Book Award. She lives in Minnesota with her family. www.catherinethimmesh.com. 

Book preview

For the wild bunch of neighborhood kids (who are no longer kids): Sydney, Colton, Kyle, Victoria, Jameson, Simon, and Jaimie.

Text copyright © 2018 by Catherine Thimmesh

Photographs: Alamy: 4; Associated Press: 9, 20 (Xiang Xiang leaving cage), 41, 45, 47, 48; Suzanne Braden, Axel Moehrenschlager, Huang Yan, Colby Loucks, Jianguo Jack Liu: 59; CheepShot: 14 (whooping crane); Kimberly Fraser/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: black-footed ferret (public domain); Getty Images: 1, 3, 5, 17, 18, 25, 26–27, 29, 31 (monkey), 37, 42–43, 50–51; Zhang Hemin/Pandas International: 19 (top); Colin Hines: 55 (leopard); Tony Hisgett: 38–39 (tiger); Vanessa Hull (Michigan State University Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability): 32–33, 35; Jeroen Kransen: 15 (golden tamarin); Yathin Krishnappa: 13 (black rhino); Sini Merikallio: 31 (snow leopard); Pandas International: title page, 8, 10–11, 21 (using radio telemetry), 22, 23, 38–39 (panda), 44, 49, 53, 56 (both); public domain: 14 (red wolf); Shutterstock: 19 (bottom: Huang Yan), 28; Kate Tann: 55 (gorilla); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: 14 (butterfly); 55 (elephant, penguins, turtle, toad [public domain]); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Southwest: 55 (turtle; public domain); Sander van der Wel: 31 (red panda); Ansgar Walk: 38–39 (polar bear)

Map © kosmozoo/Getty Images

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Cover photographs © Alatom/Getty Images

Cover design by Yay! Design

ISBN: 978-0-544-81891-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

eISBN 978-1-328-47665-4

v2.0219

Prologue

L umbering down the grassy mountainside in southwestern China—being careful not to slip—is a giant panda teddy bear. It is black and white and fluffy and fuzzy, and it walks upright, unassisted—which is odd for a teddy bear of any species or size. Odder still is the fact that its teddy bear arms are wrapped tightly around a roly-poly furball who squirms and makes noises—announcing to the world that he isn’t stuffed with fluff. He’s a living, breathing baby panda cub.

Pandas In Peril

D eep in the forest, high in the mountains—amidst the evergreens, the firs, the spruces—sits a giant panda. She’s plopped herself on the forest floor, and she munches bamboo shoot after bamboo shoot. It’s hard for humans to cut through bamboo with an ax, but the panda peels and eats a single bamboo shoot in forty seconds! She chomps on bamboo sixteen hours a day, every day. Except . . . when she doesn’t.

There are typically only two reasons why a female panda would stop the bamboo eat-a-thon: if she were giving birth or tending to her new cub. A newborn panda cub is exceptionally fragile: weighing only four ounces, blind, hairless, unable to walk (or crawl or scoot), unable to feed itself, and, somewhat surprisingly, unable to poop by itself (which can prove deadly). So for several days Mama Panda will not leave her cub’s side even for a moment.

A giant panda in the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province, China. The iconic round face of the panda is not chubbiness; it’s due to massive cheek muscles. The cheek and jaw muscles are so powerful,

Reviews for Camp Panda

[melodyreads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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