Giant panda gives birth to twins

When Mei’s first cub was delivered at 5:35 p.m., many of her keepers thought that her labor was over and many supervisors had already gone home.

Immediate preparations for the birth were underway when the giant panda’s care team noticed Mei Xiang’s water break. Tai Shan, the first cub, has been born in 2005 and has returned to China five years later.

The second panda cub actually came as a surprise for Laurie Thompson, one of the Panda biologists at the National Zoo. “It is too early to guess about when the cubs will be placed together”, the Smithsonian National Zoo said.

“We’re very excited, but we’re very cautious”, he said before the second cub’s birth, noting that in 2012, Mei Xiang gave birth to a cub that died after just six days.

In more than three decades of trying to breed pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, there has been plenty of heartbreak.

However, at 10:07 p.m., as Thompson was observing Mei and her new baby via the Panda monitor they kept on her, she heard Mei making noises that sounded like the vocalizations she was making when she was having contractions.

Those tuned in to the zoo’s Panda Cam on Saturday night were treated to quite a show as Mei Xiang delivered her cubs just hours apart. National Zoo began tweeting about the birth of the new pandas the moment they discovered that Mei Xiang was in labour. “The team developed a few different strategies and will continue to try different methods of swapping and hand-rearing”, they said on their website. These cubs, born this year, made their grand public debut on August 21 in this adorable photo-shoot.

The public also won’t learn immediately whether the cub is male or female or whether the zoo’s male panda, Tian Tian, is the cub’s father. But the Washington pandas have a history that makes them closely watched.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the pandas pair lent to the United States by China after Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972, successfully mated five times, but none of the cubs lived longer than a few days. More cubs born in Washington have died than survived, and news of a birth has often been greeted warily.

Stealing their thunder just a little bit are cubs at the Bifengxia Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center in Ya’an City, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Their big sister, Bao Bao, turned two on Sunday. It takes time to determine the tiny cub’s gender and Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated with sperm from Tian Tian and a panda named Hui Hui from Wolong, China, who was determined to be one of the best genetic matches.