Endangered
Red Panda
Ailurus fulgens
The red panda, also known as the lesser panda, is a small mammal native to the eastern Himalayas and southwestern China.
Appearance
The red panda's coat is mainly red or orange-brown with a black belly and legs. The muzzle, cheeks, brows and inner ear margins are mostly white while the bushy tail has red and buff ring patterns and a dark brown tip. The colouration appears to serve as camouflage in habitat with red moss and white lichen-covered trees.
The guard hairs on the back have a circular cross-section and are 47–56 mm (1.9–2.2 in) long. The red panda has a relatively small head, though proportionally larger than in similarly sized raccoons, with a reduced snout and triangular ears, and nearly evenly lengthed limbs.
Published measurements include mass about 120.
Range and habitat
The red panda inhabits Nepal, the states of Sikkim, West Bengal and Arunachal Pradesh in India, Bhutan, northern Myanmar, and southern Tibet, Sichuan and Yunnan in China. The global potential the red panda has been estimated to comprise 47,100 km2 (18,200 sq mi) at most. This habitat usually lives in located in the temperate climate zone of the Himalayas with a mean annual temperature range of 18–24 °C (64–75 °F). Throughout this range, it has been recorded at elevations of 2,000–4,300 m (6,600–14,100 ft).
China has initiated several projects to protect its environment and wildlife, among them Grain for Green, The Natural Forest Protection Project and the National Wildlife/Natural Reserve Construction Project.
Habitat labels include shrubland and forest.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The red panda appears to be both nocturnal and crepuscular, sleeping intermittently at night. It is adapted for climbing and descends to the ground head-first with the hindfeet holding on to the middle of the tree trunk.
The red panda is largely herbivorous and feeds primarily on bamboo, mainly the genera Phyllostachys, Sinarundinaria, Thamnocalamus and Chimonobambusa. Red pandas are long-day breeders, reproducing after the winter solstice as daylight grows longer. Prior to giving birth, the female selects a denning site, such as a tree, log or stump hollow or rock crevice, and builds a nest using material from nearby, such as twigs, sticks, branches, bark bits, leaves, grass and moss.
In crisis
The evolutionary lineage of the red panda (Ailuridae) stretches back around 25 to 18 million years ago, as indicated by extinct fossil relatives found in Eurasia and North America. It is threatened by poaching as well as destruction and fragmentation of habitat due to deforestation. The species has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2015.
The red panda is primarily threatened by the destruction and fragmentation of its habitat, the causes of that include increasing human population, deforestation, the unlawful taking of non-wood forest material and disturbances by herders and livestock. Threats identified in Nepal's Lamjung District include grazing by livestock during seasonal transhumance, human-made forest fires and the collection of bamboo as cattle fodder in winter.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Red Panda is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Red Panda, Wikidata item Q41960. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
