With the generous support from PDXWildlife followers, we were able to raise over $2000 to purchase a laboratory grade freeze dryer. The extremely large and heavy unit is now setup in our office at Bifengxia. This allows us to keep a close relationship with a copious amount of panda feces. Our current interns (Scout, Sophany & Celina) have been processing samples non-stop and it looks like we will be able to catch up, with a little luck, in the next few months.

The 300lb. freeze dryer had a very busy first few weeks as we had to coordinate the purchase and delivery over an app that is immensely popular in China- QQ. After we bought the freeze dryer and had it shipped, the company we purchased it from decided to tell us that they had to pick a new address since the delivery truck could not make the drive up the mountain to Bifengxia. This left us scrambling to find someone who had a large enough truck to pick it up upon its arrival. Thankfully, the head of Bifengxia, Mr. Zhang, sprang into action and arranged to use his own vehicle. Not fully understanding the immense size of the freeze dryer, we moved few doors down to a cubicle infused, spacious, new office. After a few weeks of trial runs to establish a working protocol, the dryer has been operating flawlessly and we are processing a new group of samples every three days.

I am always pleasantly surprised when everyone comes together to tackle a task that takes several months and thousands of dollars to complete. It really makes our passion of researching pandas a fruitful adventure. We sincerely appreciate the support from all of our friends, family, co-workers, and panda enthusiasts for allowing us to make the leap into becoming a more self-sufficient research organization. It’s a huge weight off of our shoulders to be able to have a certain amount of autonomy and to get closer to an end result. But, enough of the sappy stuff- Let’s get back to the poop!