I have a wildlife zoo

The two cubs hop and skip along the trail sprinkled with sunlight, cheerful all the way!

Red Bean also hurried to follow, fulfilling her motherly duty.

Otherwise, when the little ones get carried away playing and run off into the distance, if they suddenly want to find their mother and look left and right to find she has disappeared, they would start to cry and fuss.

Fang Ye smiled and watched the little ones play for a while, then stood up, greeted Chestnut, and left the red panda exhibit.

"Let's go, let's take another stroll in the rural exhibition area!"

The netizens were not yet ready to leave: "Aw, the red panda cubs are so cute!"

"This is one of those animals that stays cute from birth to old age! That's why red pandas are treasures from heaven."

"Speaking of which, when are the giant pandas going to have a baby? I want to see giant panda cubs nursing!"

Fang Ye glanced at the barrage of comments and laughed, "We just celebrated Cloud and Zhuangzhuang's birthdays during the summer vacation, and after the birthday they turned five, which also means they are old enough to mate. Next spring, we'll try to let them meet and see if they can spark love. If we're lucky, we could be seeing cubs."

"Wow, looking forward to it!"

"I thought giant pandas can't mate until they're 7 years old?"

"Why not let them meet? Shouldn't they be encouraged to bond early on?"

Fang Ye explained: "Captive giant pandas reach sexual maturity earlier than those in the wild!"

As for why they don't meet, first of all, giant pandas start living alone after they reach adulthood. If they stay together outside of their mating season, they'll just end up fighting.

There's an old saying, 'Serve three years as a soldier, and even a sow will seem like a beauty.' It applies to giant pandas too!

If you can see each other all the time, there's no attraction when it matters. It's the absence of seeing each other for a long time that will provoke a fierce passion all at once.

Of course, giant pandas have a peak mating period that only lasts a few days, so it's not like we do nothing to prepare and just throw them together. We start by changing their enclosures at the onset of their estrus, allowing them to smell the opposite sex's feces, so they can familiarize themselves with the scent.

We will also play the mating calls of females to male giant pandas to draw out the flame in their hearts, then let them watch some panda mating footage so they understand what they are supposed to do before we put them together.

"Hahaha, is it really that fun?"

"Giant pandas have to watch videos?"

"I've never heard such interesting stuff before!"

Fang Ye said, "Showing videos to pandas is one of my ideas, it hasn't been put into practice yet! It's because breeding giant pandas in the wild is easy, but it's quite difficult in captivity, so I'm thinking whether they need some kind of learning model."

"The zoo director has some cool ideas!"

Chatting with the netizens along the way, they arrived at the rural exhibition area.

At the entrance of the exhibition area, a vibrant field of rice grew robustly, reflecting a shimmering light yellow under the sunlight, like jade, full of life and vitality.

The stream trickled quietly along the stone channel, sparkling like scattered gold, glistening in the light.

A small squirrel scurried down from a tree and burrowed into the dense shrubbery.

Quack quack~

About a dozen gray-brown ducks leisurely drifted around amidst the vibrant green rice, sometimes clustering, sometimes scattering.

Chirp chirp tweet tweet~

A gentle breeze brought along the rustling of the rice leaves, accompanied by the pleasant and melodious chirping of birds from the rice fields, unconsciously relaxing anyone's mood.

The netizens, upon seeing the scenery, exclaimed one after another: "Wow, they even grow crops in the zoo!"

"To create a rural exhibition area, they've actually cultivated a field, that's pretty hardcore."

"They've been growing rice since the first half of the year! It's especially for the kids to experience farming, I suspect the zoo director made the rural exhibition area just for this field."

"So beautiful! Perfectly fits the rural beauty I imagined, far from the city's hustle and bustle. I wish I could live here!"

As Fang Ye passed by the paddy fields, he looked at the beautiful scenery and suddenly stopped in his tracks, a look of surprise on his face.

"Eh?"

He gestured to Lan Li with his hand, signaling her to turn the camera.

"What has the director discovered?"

"I can't see anything, though?"

The online audience was at a loss.

A gust of wind blew, causing the rice leaves to sway and revealing a bent stalk of rice behind them with a small bird perched on it.

Its head and back were yellowish-brown, somewhat similar to a sparrow, but its chest was yellow.

The pleasant singing was coming from it.

Fang Ye said, "Do you see that bird? Does anyone recognize it?"

"Don't recognize it!"

"Looks like a sparrow!"

"I know it, it's a rice bird!"

Fang Ye said, "This is the yellow-breasted bunting, a very famous kind of bird! It's called 'rice bird' in Guangdong and 'yellow guts' in the capital, along with other various names.

Although not closely related to sparrows, they share one common trait; it used to be one of the most widespread and numerous bird species on the Eurasian continent, with estimations of its population reaching several millions or even more at its peak.

From Finland, the Russian Far East to Japan, their presence was common. Every autumn, they would travel south to winter following the cold air, crossing China to wintering spots in several southern provinces."

A sharp-eyed netizen noticed Fang Ye's choice of words: "Used to?"

"That's right, in just a few decades, the population of yellow-breasted buntings dropped by 95%, jumping five grades on the endangered species red list from least concern, near threatened, vulnerable, endangered to critically endangered. Now, they have become a first-class protected animal."

"Shocked, why has it declined so rapidly?"

Fang Ye sighed, "Previously, rice birds were a very popular delicacy in Guangdong and some other regions, so much so that even birdwatching guidebooks mentioned it straightforwardly, which shows how deeply ingrained this image was in people's hearts.

In the nineties, from street stalls to restaurant dishes, rice bird as an ingredient could be found everywhere. Even festivals like the 'Sanshui Culinary Festival' used the rice bird as a selling point, drawing thousands of visitors with the large-scale hunting and killing of these birds.

With the massive hunting, the numbers of rice birds plummeted, and the price soared, becoming not just food but a distorted symbol of status.

Although the country has long imposed a total ban on consuming rice birds, some hotels seeking profits would still sell them secretly.

You could say that the rice bird was eaten into extinction."

The story of the yellow-breasted bunting left the audience sighing in dismay.

"Ah! It's heartbreaking. I hope it won't become the next passenger pigeon!"

"As someone from Guangdong, hearing this for the first time, how could anyone have the heart to eat such a beautiful bird?"

"As a child, I did see many for sale, with rice birds skewered in strings and hung at the storefront. But I never ate one; it felt a bit disgusting."

"When I was younger, you could see these birds in trees everywhere! It's been many years since I've seen one now."

"Why do some people always think about eating wild animals! This bad habit needs to change."

"Masked palm civets, pangolins, rice birds, all innocent victims of people's cravings for exotic delicacy!"

"It's not too late to protect them now. It requires collective effort from all of us."