- Loss of Habitat
At low altitudes, the spread of agriculture has changed the bamboo areas into fields. Frequently, only one type of bamboo species grows in the higher ridges. When species flowers and dies, pandas may be deprived for food until the bamboo regenerates. Throughout the mid-1970s, the widespread starvation of pandas in Minshan was mainly due to destruction of low-altitude bamboo by agricultural development. Forty-one pandas starved to death in the Pingwu County of Sichuan in 1974 and 1975, when an arrow bamboo species had been eliminated from the lower slopes. The villagers’ advance deprives pandas of food at low elevations and may ultimately confine animals to the upper altitudinal limit of bamboo.
Moreover, villagers go into high mountain areas to collect wood for fuel and to cut timber for roof shingles and house beams. Firewood and timber for housing are necessary materials, but few can afford to buy from commercial enterprises; it is only a minor offense to cut a winter’s supply of fuel oneself. Forest guards know that the peasants need to trees for firewood. Local people have fought and killed guards and each other over forestry rights. Thus, guards are reluctant to stop the cutting of trees even though it is not legal.
According to a WWF news release in 1987 ‘Satellite images reveal that forest clearance for agriculture will be the main cause of panda extinction, not lack of food through bamboo flowering.’ Even in reserves where there is no more commercial logging, the loss of forest cover continues at a horrifying pace. In Wolong, peasants have destroyed 14km square of forest between 1975 and 1983, and in other areas of panda range the situation is even more serious. In the last 30 years Sichuan has lost some 30 percent of its forests, and more than half of the natural forest vegetation has been destroyed or disturbed so badly that it no longer provides suitable panda habitat. Giant panda do not just need bamboo, they need large trees for scent-marking, and sheltered trees (often in huge hollow trees) for use as maternity dens. Clear-felling creates a habitat almost useless to giant pandas even though bamboo may continue to grow. It is not only giant panda that face long-term difficulties if the forests are clear-felled. Valuable timber trees like fir and hemlock do not readily invade the clear-cut areas. Instead, they are replaced by birch and maple whose light, wind-borne seeds make them better colonizers.