DC pandas will be returning to China in mid-November, weeks earlier than expected

WASHINGTON – The National Zoo’s 3 famous person large pandas will be heading house slightly earlier than expected. Zoo officers advised The Associated Press on Thursday that grownup bears Mei Xiang and Tian Tian and their cub Xiao Qi Ji will be returning to China someday in mid-November.

The zoo’s trade settlement with the Chinese executive, at first brokered by way of President Richard Nixon 50 years in the past, expires Dec. 7. Ongoing negotiations to lengthen the settlement have not produced effects, amid hypothesis from China-watchers that Beijing is gradually pulling its pandas from Western countries due to deteriorating diplomatic family members with the U.S. and different international locations.

Panda-philes across the nation had turned around the December date because the remaining likelihood to view the long-lasting bears. But the zoo, for undisclosed causes, mentioned the departure would occur about 3 weeks earlier.

“Discussions with our Chinese partner, the China Wildlife Conservation Association, to develop a future giant panda program will likely start after the current pandas have returned to China,” zoo spokesperson Annalisa Meyer mentioned in an e-mail. “After 51 years of success, we remain committed to giant panda conservation. … It’s our intention to have giant pandas at the Zoo again and continue our research here and conservation work in China.”

The bears were a wildly common enchantment and an unofficial image of the country’s capital for many years. Every birthday and anniversary used to be an occasion for public celebration and the long-shot birth of Xiao Qi Ji in the midst of the pandemic in August 2020 drove hundreds of thousands of audience to the zoo’s panda-cam.

Zoo officers say they continue to be hopeful they will come to a brand new settlement with the Chinese executive. The San Diego zoo returned its pandas in 2019, and the remaining undergo on the Memphis, Tennessee, zoo went house earlier this yr. The departure of the National Zoo’s bears would imply that the one large pandas left in America are on the Atlanta Zoo — and that mortgage settlement expires overdue subsequent yr.

Beijing lately lends out 65 pandas to 19 international locations via “cooperative research programs” with a said challenge to higher offer protection to the susceptible species. The pandas go back to China once they succeed in previous age, and any cubs born in the United States are despatched to China round age 3 or 4.