Red panda

Where does the red panda live?

Home: Cool mountain forests of the eastern Himalayas, full of bamboo.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Nepal, India, Bhutan, China, Myanmar.

Conservation status from the IUCN: endangered.

The short profile

Fully grown: 51–64 cm long, plus a tail of 28–49 cm. It weighs about 5.5 kilograms. On the menu: plants.

The story behind it

A red panda lives high up, between about two thousand and four thousand three hundred metres, where the mountain forest is cool, misty and stuffed with bamboo. Its stomach is built like a meat-eater's and cannot get much out of leaves, so it must eat enormous amounts: well over one and a half kilograms of fresh bamboo leaves a day. To hold a stem steady it uses a false thumb, which is not a finger at all but a wrist bone that grew long and works like an extra grip. The thick tail is a blanket as much as a balance pole: on a cold night the panda curls up on a branch and wraps the tail over its face and feet. Scientists now split red pandas into two species, the Himalayan and the Chinese red panda, separated by rivers and mountains. Fewer than ten thousand are thought to be left, forests are being cleared and cut into pieces, and the IUCN lists the red panda as endangered.

Find it on the globe

Red panda is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.