The giant pandas of Wolong do not move about their home ranges to any great extent. A resident, especially a young lower status or inexperienced animal, will visit as little as 10 per cent of its home range in any one month, and some parts are visited only rarely. This is atypical of carnivore behaviour, a feature of which is extensive foraging movements within home ranges. The giant panda's strategy here is not altogether surprising as the species is a carnivore only taxonomically. In practice, they are herbivores. The only time they need to move extensively is during bamboo dieback, when migration to other food areas is forced on them. Males have no favorite area, or core area, and tend to use more of their range than females. Females concentrate their activities within a core area (30-40 hectares, or 74-99 acres) which contains most of the resources they need. A female will share her core area with adult males only, because although she does not patrol the boundary of her core area, this zone is sacrosanct and sub-adults and other females are regarded as trespassers.

Foraging movements depend on where the best available food is in any season. Spring is an active time for giant pandas, when they make good use of their home ranges in search of stands of umbrella bamboo. In spring 1981, a poor season for the shoots of this bamboo, one of the radio-collared females, Zhen, actually crossed over Wolong Valley to the opposite slope in search of food. Not only was this a long journey for a giant panda but a very risky one as well, across a cultivated, populous valley lacking any cover. The following two years were good food years and Zhen made no attempts to cross over again.

Summer is when pandas are at their laziest. They make many fewer excursions around their home ranges and loll about eating long picnics of bamboo. Things hot up again in the winter, a time of dwindling food supplies and, for males, the period leading up to finding a mate. During this period, adult males use more than half of their home range and are busy keeping tabs on the females within it. Significantly, sub-adult males, which are not yet ready to breed, use less than half of their ranges during this period.

Female home ranges are located in the best areas. Best for food, for microclimate, for nesting sites and for foraging. This translates into a number of habitat features: almost continuous cover of arrow bamboo; south- and west-facing exposures, where snow does not persist for as long as on other inclines; gently sloping ground, which avoids strenuous climbing and saves precious energy; hollow trees or caves for dry, secure den sites; and a well-wooded area with an almost continuous forest canopy. In open areas bamboo grows more densely than beneath a canopy and the stalks are drier and tougher. They also tend to be stunted and more leaves die in winter, which reduces the nutritional content. A good canopy supports less dense, more nutritious bamboo groves and also gives shelter from the rain and snow. The large trees that form the canopy also provide den sites.

The main imperative for a male is to maximize access to potential mates, which means home range overlap with as many females as possible. Sub-adults draw the short straw in this situation. They have to make do with less than ideal living quarters. In the Wolong study two sub-adults that had formed a loose acquaintance, Long and Ning, shared a home range on a steep hillside cut by many ravines and almost denuded of trees. They concentrated their foraging in and around the remaining forest patches rather than attempting to exploit the open slopes. This shows that open habitat is clearly not preferred and implies a level of competition between adults and sub-adults for resources.