Excitement builds at Toronto Zoo ahead of Monday’s giant panda arrivals

The Pandas are coming! The Pandas are coming!

You have to have come of age before the fall of the Soviet Union, or be a movie buff, to get that joke. But it does reflect the excitement, let's say pandamonium (stop it!), over the arrival in Toronto on Monday of two giant pandas from Communist China.

"It's a countdown right now," Maria Franke, the Toronto Zoo's curator of mammals, told CBC News. "It's very exciting. We did have them back in 1985, but it was really a short-term loan."

This time, five-year-old female Er Shun and four-year-old male Da Mao will spend 10 years in Canada, five in Toronto and five at the zoo in Calgary, which happens to be Prime Minister Stephen Harper's home town.

"The fact that we're getting them here for five years, it’s a conservation partnership with China, so we hope to breed them — it's really exciting," Franke said.

[ Related: Zoo on 'countdown' ahead of pandas' arrival in Toronto ]

Pandas are big furry expressions of Chinese soft power lent to friendly countries to help cement good relations. Canada had been lobbying to acquire a pair for years and the Conservative government's shift from chilly indifference to the Asian superpower to active engagement opened the door to their arrival here.

Harper himself is expected to be among the dignitaries to greet the big, bamboo-munching bears when they arrive on a special FedEx flight, the Globe and Mail reported.

“It is a tremendous honour for Canada to be entrusted with [the pandas],” Harper press secretary Julie Vaux told the Globe via email. “The pandas, Er Shun and Ji Li, are two of China’s national treasures. They will be an enduring reminder of the deep friendship and goodwill that exists between our countries.”

Er Shun's name means "Double Smoothness," and Da Mao, a late substitute for another bear who was discovered to be female, means "Big Mao."

[ Related: Testing reveals Canada-bound pandas were both female ]

The bears will come to Canada aboard a special FedEx cargo plane, accompanied by two Chinese keepers who will stay for two years to train Canadian handlers on the pandas' needs. The animals will live in specially built enclosures. They'll make their public debut in May after acclimatizing to Canada and undergoing a 30-day quarantine.

I hate to be a wet blanket at this point, but I hope things are running a little more smoothly at the Calgary Zoo by the time the pandas get there. It's suffered a string of animal deaths in recent years, including a penguin last December that gagged on a stick and a grey owl that died last fall while being moved between holding areas, according to the Calgary Sun.

A keeper at the Calgary zoo was hurt earlier this month trying to corral some gorillas that broke into a kitchen, according to The Canadian Press. Three years ago, another gorilla nearly got out of its enclosure after a zookeeper failed to shut it properly. And in 2009 yet another gorilla got hold of a large knife a keeper had left in the exhibit, luckily losing interest in the blade before any primate was hurt.

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The hope is Er Shun and Da Mao will mate and produce a cub. Pandas are notoriously reluctant to get jiggy with each other, one reason there are only 1,600 left in the wild, the Globe said. About 300 pandas live in captivity.

Laura Doty of the Memphis Zoo, which also has pandas, told the Toronto Star the big, slow-moving bears hold a strange fascination for humans.

“(It’s) honestly one I’m still trying to figure out,” said Doty. “They’re just so cute and cuddly and they’re so rare . . . I think everybody kind of feels drawn to them.”

Pandas' "bizarre" biology may be behind some of that fascination, said animal behaviourist Tim Hain of the University of Western Ontario.

While most bears are carnivorous, pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo while sitting on their behinds like people. They're non-threatening, clumsy-looking, a little cartoonish.

“They just don’t look like they can do it by themselves, so that might be one thing that attracts people to them,” Hain told the Star.“We have this maternal instinct, all of us, to protect something that looks like it can’t handle it by itself.”