WASHINGTON — The “cake” was made from frozen fruit juice, sweet potatoes, carrots and sugar cane. It lasted about 15 minutes once giant panda mama Mei Xiang and her cub Xiao Qi Ji got hold of it.
The National Zoo’s most famous tenants had an enthusiastic breakfast Saturday in front of adoring crowds as the zoo celebrated 50 years of its iconic panda exchange agreement with the Chinese government.
Xiao Qi Ji’s father, Tian Tian, largely sat out the festivities, munching bamboo in a neighboring enclosure with the sounds of his chomping clearly audible during a statement by Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang. The ambassador praised the bears as “a symbol of the friendship” between the nations.
Pandas are almost entirely solitary by nature, and in the wild, Tian Tian would probably never even meet his child. He received a similar cake for lunch.
In addition to hailing the 1972 agreement sparked by then-President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to China, Saturday’s celebration also highlighted the success of the global giant panda breeding program, which has helped bring the bears back from the brink of extinction.
Xiao Qi Ji’s birth in August 2020 was hailed as a near miracle, due to Mei Xiang’s advanced age and the fact that zoo staff performed the artificial insemination procedure under tight restrictions shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic closed the entire zoo. At age 22, Mei Xiang was the oldest giant panda to successfully give birth in the United States.
Normally, zoo staff would have used a combination of frozen sperm and fresh semen extracted from Tian Tian. But in order to minimize the number of close-quarters medical procedures, zoo officials used only frozen semen.
“It was definitely a long-shot pregnancy,” said Bryan Amaral, the zoo’s senior curator for mammals.
In honor of that long shot, the now 20-month-old cub was given a name that translates as “little miracle.” His birth in mid-pandemic sparked a fresh wave of pandamania, with viewership on the zoo’s panda-cam livestream spiking by 1,200 percent.
“I know how passionate people are about pandas,” Amaral said.
Sure enough, crowds started streaming straight for the panda section at 8 a.m. when the zoo opened. Sisters Lorelai and Everley Greenwell, age 6 and 5, ran toward the enclosure chanting “Pandas! Pandas!”
They watched the cub tumble around, try to wrestle his mom and tear the zero off the big “50” emblazoned on the ice cake.
“They knew this was coming,” said the girls’ mother, Kayleigh Greenwell of Mount Ranier, Md. “We’ve been talking about it all week.”
