Red Panda Twins Play in the Snow at Sapporo's Maruyama Zoo

Two young red pandas at Sapporo's Maruyama Zoo tumble, chase and wrestle across fresh snow in this short clip from Hokkaido. For an animal that lives high in the Himalayan forests, a snowy winter morning is home ground, and the pair treat it like a playground.

Maruyama Zoo in Sapporo, Hokkaido

Sapporo Maruyama Zoo opened on 5 May 1951 and is the oldest zoo in Hokkaido. It sits inside Maruyama Park in the west of the city and covers 22.5 hectares, home to about 737 animals of 168 species.

The red pandas live in the Highlands pavilion of the zoo's Wakuwaku Asia Zone, next to the Asian black bears. Other residents include polar bears, Asian elephants, Amur tigers, snow leopards and Yezo brown bears. The zoo is about a 15-minute walk from Maruyama-Kōen Station on Sapporo's Tōzai subway line.

Watch the red panda twins play in the snow

The video was uploaded to YouTube by Mmovies21 under the title "雪で遊ぶレッサーパンダ" (red pandas playing in the snow). The two cubs roll, pounce and slide over each other, and their long ringed tails stay easy to follow against the white ground.

Red pandas are agile tree climbers, and that long tail helps them keep their balance on branches as well as in a snowy tussle. For more snowy scenes, see our red-panda photographs with updated context and a giant panda in a separate snowy video.

Red panda facts: size, habitat and diet

• Scientific name: Ailurus fulgens, described by Frédéric Cuvier in 1825. It is the only living member of its genus and is not a close relative of the giant panda.
• Size: head and body 51–63.5 cm, plus a tail of 28–48.5 cm. Adults weigh about 3.2–15 kg.
• Range: Nepal, India (Sikkim, West Bengal and Arunachal Pradesh), Bhutan, southern Tibet, northern Myanmar and the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan.
• Habitat: temperate mountain forest with dense bamboo near water, at roughly 2,000–4,300 metres.
• Diet: mostly bamboo leaves and shoots, with fruit, blossoms, acorns and occasionally eggs or small animals. A red panda needs more than 1.5 kg of fresh leaves a day.
• Lifespan: up to about 14 years in captivity.

Scientists recognise two forms, the Himalayan red panda and the Chinese red panda, which split around 250,000 years ago. A 2020 genetic study proposed treating them as separate species, with the Siang River in the eastern Himalaya as the dividing line.

Built for cold mountain winters

Red pandas are well equipped for snow. A dense, woolly undercoat sits beneath the long reddish guard hairs, and the soles of their paws are covered in fur, which gives grip and insulation on snow and ice. A snowy Hokkaido winter is close to the conditions of their mountain home.

Red panda conservation

The red panda is listed as Endangered by the IUCN. The wild population is estimated at about 10,000 animals and is falling, mainly because of habitat loss and fragmentation in the Himalayan forests.

Zoo breeding programmes keep a healthy captive population, while groups such as the Red Panda Network work with local communities to protect forest habitat. Their conservation resources are a good place to learn more. Similar community-led work protects another Himalayan species, as told in Tibetan Monasteries and Snow-Leopard Conservation.

Related reading

• Red Pandas in Snow: Winter Photographs and Their Forest Habitat
• Da Mao in the Snow: Toronto Zoo’s Giant Panda Video
• Flying Squirrel Portraits: Faces, Tree Trunks and Hollows
• Tibetan Monasteries and Snow-Leopard Conservation

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