Our Curious Panda Pinkety is a red panda, so he’s slightly bigger than a pet cat with thick reddish fur.
As well as being nosy and a right chatterbox, Pinkety is a very good acrobat and if he chose to live in the wild would spend most of his time in the trees. He also loves mountains as his original home is in the Himalayas, across China, Nepal, India and Bhutan. (Can you find these countries on a map of the world?)
Red pandas have a particularly special tail. Apart from being super stripy it’s very long and bushy. In the winter, to be extra cosy Pinkety wraps his tail around himself before taking a snooze. His tail also helps him to balance and like all red pandas he is quite the climber – he does really like the circus.
He will climb up trees, he will leap up walls, he will bound up any gates or fences – he just loves to get up high and see what’s going on below. Because of his Himalayan background, winter is his favourite season (and he can throw a mean snowball) but he’s happy in any kind of weather as long as there are things to jump up or over.
In the wild red pandas eat mainly bamboo leaves and shoots but they sometimes nibble on grasses, acorns and bird eggs.
Pinkety, like most human children, has a very sweet tooth, he loves to eat cakes and biscuits! In one experiment, scientists gave red pandas a choice between bowls of fresh water, water with sugar stirred into it, or water with an artificial sweetener in it – and they all chose the artificial sweet stuff. This makes red pandas very unusual in what they can taste. And maybe this helps to explain why Pinkety himself can be a bit hyper sometimes.
Don’t ever leave a can of Diet Coke out when he’s nearby…
Have you ever heard red pandas chatting in the wild? Probably not, but it's amazing!
The sound they make is called “twittering” and it sounds very much like high-pitched giggling, like they basically can’t stop laughing about something very silly indeed. Which, if you meet Pinkety himself, fits his character very well.
If you ever see red pandas in a zoo, you’ll notice that they spend most of their time walking around on all fours but they’re also very good at standing up on their two hind legs. And Pinkety has practised this so hard that he can now walk almost as well as a human! We think this is why he likes being around people so much. Maybe there’s even part of his brain that thinks he is a person?
You might not think that Pinkety is good at hiding (after all, his reddish-brown fur is quite easy to spot) but in the wild his colour is perfect for blending in with the type of moss that grows on the fir trees where red pandas live. It really helps him stay out of the way of those greedy snow leopards. And it’s also perfect for towns and cities because Pinkety’s fur is the colour of 93% of all bricks. (OK we made that up, but you try spotting Pinkety when he’s leaning up against the side of someone’s house across your street.)
