Giant Panda Cub Bao Bao Is Growing Up Fast

Today we are weighing Bao Bao and also taking some measurements on her and this is to just sort of chart her progress and her growth and development. So we try to sort of get that information, compare it to other panda cubs, make sure she's on the right track. Bao Bao is definitely healthy. She's quite heavy at this point, over 17 pounds, so we're pretty confident that she's doing just fine. At birth, they're basically the size of a stick of butter, around four ounces, so that's a lot of growing in four and a half months. Developmentally probably the biggest milestone right now is learning to walk. That's kind of a slow process of crawling and kind of arm crawling and then getting your legs under you and she pretty much just in the last few weeks has really gotten the walking thing down so that she's not kind of falling as she's going along. And then the next milestone that she's working on right now is her climbing. So you'll see her climb up on the lower level of the rock work and then eventually she'll start moving higher and higher and that's just kind of in preparation for climbing trees. Right now she's still nursing from Meishang and that's her only source of food, but in the next month or two, around six months, she should start nibbling on some leaves from the bamboo. Right now she's sort of mouthing it, but she's not actually ingesting anything, but that's certainly the step towards taking her first bite of it and eating it. And then once she starts eating bamboo, she'll probably start eating some of the other things that we give the pandas, like apple and sweet potato and pear, that kind of stuff.