See San Diego's New Baby Panda in Public for the First Time

January 14, 2013 at 4:30 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

It's been a while since we've written about our beloved San Diego Zoo, and even longer since we've written about it as anything but an exercise in kind of entertaining but also sort of unseemly schadenfreude. Let us remedy that with background and a video of the zoo's new baby panda making his public debut.

The toddler's name is Xiao Liwu. He first met the public last Wednesday, which is when the video below was taken. The San Diego Zoo - which is one of only four American zoos with pandas - has now had six successful panda births. That makes the park the single most successful panda breeding facility outside of China.

This morning's San Diego Zoo blog post on Xiao Liwu is here, and has adorable lines like "his favorite toy is a little ball that he likes to hug and roll with." In the video you can see him tumbling around while mom Bai Yun looks on with total nonchalance. We'd usually make some kind of joke about how this is exactly why pandas are going extinct - they can't be bothered either to reproduce or to protect their reproduced offspring - but this thing might actually be too cute for cynicism.

The weekend forecast starting on Friday in San Diego, by the by, calls for 68, 69, and 68 degree days. There is, across the three days, a zero percent chance of rain. So if you like the thought of a sunny weekend spent looking at baby pandas, that's the direction you want to be heading. And if you don't like that thought, you're frankly no friend of ours.

[Photo: SDZoo / YouTube]

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