Guess which is the most famous bear in all the world? The answer is easy- Its the panda! With its clumsy, big head and its great paws, you feel you want to hug it. Its like a big toy, every little child would love one to play with. In China, it is called 'the great cat bear.' A very small number of pandas live in the mountains of Szechuan, in the south-western part of the country. Szechuan is between 1600 and 3600 metres in altitude, and lies on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. In 1963, the panda was declared a protected species, and the Wolong Reserve, the largest reserve in all China, was established as a sanctuary for it. Today, thanks to the study centre on the reserve, and the World Wildlife Fund, we know a lot about the panda. For example, we know that it gives birth to two young, of which only one survives. Biologists have also discovered that the panda is constantly eating bamboo shoots. Because of the particular structure of its intestine, a panda can only assimilate a small part of the fifteen to twenty kilos of food that it swallows each day. Only a little less than a fifth of this gets digested, and the rest is excreted. And so the poor little bear is always hungry!