VERY INTERESTING: RED PANDA

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about 

5 Fantastic Facts About Red Pandas

In celebrating fifteen years of community-based red panda conservation, we're sharing some fascinating information about this awesome animal.

As a highly specialized species, red pandas have many unique traits that set them apart but they are also very important to global biodiversity. They have been identified as a flagship species and an indicator of ecological health of the Eastern Himalayan Broadleaf Forest Ecoregion — one of our planet's biodiversity hotspots — that supports over 500 million people! Their conservation has landscape-level impacts, and like an umbrella, the entire ecoregion (its forests and wildlife) are protected when red pandas are conserved. Here are fifteen of our other favorite red panda facts!

1. Red Pandas Are The First Panda

In 1825, nearly 50 years before the giant panda was discovered, Frédéric Cuvier first described the red panda as the most beautiful animal he had ever seen. Georges-Frédéric Cuvier was a French zoologist and paleontologist who was the head keeper of the menagerie at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris from 1804 to 1838 (the year he died). He was the younger brother of the "founding father of paleontology", Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric. Georges-Frédéric's work was also widely known and was mentioned in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick! Georges-Frédéric actually first described the western red panda (Ailurus fulgens fulgens). In 1897, F. W. Styan discovered another red panda subspecies and named it Ailurus fulgens styani, now refulgens. Now you can see why red pandas are the first panda — the original panda.

2. They Are Not Related to Giant Pandas

The red panda's name might lead you to think that its closest relative is the giant panda, but studies show that they are most closely related to raccoons! Recent genetic research also associates them with the family Mustelidae, which includes weasels, otters, and wolverines.

3. A Red Panda's Diet is 98% Bamboo

​Red pandas have to eat 20 to 30 percent of their body weight in bamboo — can eat up to 20,000 leaves! — each day. Bamboo doesn't offer much nutrition and they can only digest about 24 percent of it. So why do red pandas eat it? Well, bamboo can grow rapidly and abundantly in the cloud forests where red pandas live. And because it is such a low-calorie option, there isn't much competition for bamboo among local wildlife, so it can be a plentiful food source! While bamboo makes up most of a red panda's diet, they will also occasionally eat eggs, insects, flowers, birds and small mammals when available.

4. They Have Many Names

Other than the first panda and original panda, red pandas are known by many names including firefox, red bear-cat, red cat-bear, and the lesser panda.

5. Red Pandas Are Kinda like Cats (and Bears)

One of their nicknames is "red bear-cat" though many of the similarities have to do with the mama-panda-baby-panda relationship. Their babies are called cubs (like bears) which are typically born in June through September in the wild and mainly stay in their dens for the first three months. Cubs use high-pitched whistles to get their mom’s attention when they are hungry. Red panda mothers will build a birthing den in a hollow tree or a tree stump and line it with leaves, grass, moss, and tree branches to nest their young. Like a cat, red panda moms use their tongues to keep their babies clean, and to keep them safe, she will carry her cubs in her mouth, by the neck (again, like cats and other carnivores), and while they curl into a ball to help with transport.

and as always have a chilled day from the Viking