Meet Xiao Qi Ji, the Smithsonian National Zoo's star panda cub

One of the cutest and rarest of creatures most likely will never find a place in our homes, but it does have a very secure place in our hearts. Rita Braver lays it out in black and white. This giant panda cub, born just a year ago at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, is called Xiaoqi Ji, which means little miracle, a very fitting name. He was kind of known, at least around Washington, as the pandemic panda because he cheered people up so much. How has that played out? We have heard from so many people just passing through in the panda house that he kind of saved them during the pandemic when they were depressed at home and they could turn on the panda cam and watch him rolling around and playing or interacting with his mom. Laurie Thompson, who helps run the panda program here, is part of a team that monitors his every move. Oh my gosh! As we saw last fall, what a cutie, when we got a rare look through glass as Thompson and chief vet Donald Kneifer performed an exam. We do a full systems and we touch all the limbs, stretch out the joints. He's growing gangbusters. He looks great. At 22, the cub's mom, Mei Zhang, was the oldest panda in North America to birth a healthy cub. She's geriatric for a panda and so we were not necessarily expecting a cub. One reason there are so few pandas in the world is that females are in heat just a couple of days a year. In fact, Mei Zhang and the zoo's male panda, Tian Tian, made Xiaoqi Ji and his three older siblings through the wonders of modern science. She's always been artificially inseminated. Yes, they've never been able to sort of figure it out. They try, but they have lots of issues with that. This time, they didn't even bother Tian Tian using his five-year-old frozen semen in order to minimize contact among the zoo staff during the pandemic. How did you learn about the new baby? They did send me an email saying, congratulations, you're the father of a new baby panda. Well, fairy godfather at least. David Rubenstein, a Washington businessman and philanthropist, has helped bankroll the pandas since 2011. He's watched with cautious pride as research developed here helped move pandas from the endangered to the vulnerable list in 2016. You only have about 2,500 of these pandas in the world, so while they're not, quote, endangered, they're not actually an abundance either. The pandas at the National Zoo and everywhere outside China are actually on loan from the Chinese government. Call it pan-diplomacy. And I do think that the U.S. has done a very good job in working with the Chinese to make certain that we will have more pandas for quite some time. Like his older brothers and sister, Xiaoqi Ji will be sent to China after a few years, but in the meantime, he will be a constant reminder of the need to preserve his whole species. People aren't going to save and conserve what they don't know and don't understand, and so if nothing else, this panda grows up to continue to say, we're out here, you know, please take care of us while you can.