FROLICKING FUN
A Toronto Zoo panda gets worldwide attention playing with a snowman,
When it’s cold outside, Toronto Zoo’s male giant panda Da Mao can be found getting up to snow good.
The unbearably cute panda has racked up almost half a million views on YouTube after he was caught on camera playing with a snowman this week.
“We don’t often build (snowmen),” said his keeper Emily Noel.
“There just happened to be extremely good packing snow, so I decided to make one and it was such good snow that it just got really big, really quickly.”
One of Da Mao’s favourite wintertime activities is demolishing snowmen.
In the video, captured by a behavioural researcher, Da Mao is seen clambering up onto the snowman and balancing on it before half of it collapses underneath him and he falls to the ground.
“This one has just taken him two or three days (to destroy),” Noel said. The YouTube video has been shared around the world with viewers commenting from as far away as Russia.
“That panda is having more fun with a snowman then I did in my entire life,” remarked one commenter.
“He’s definitely a clown,” mammal curator Maria Franke said of Da Mao.
“We do tons of things (for enrichment), like, even just empty boxes . . . we’ll put treats in it like apples or bamboo.”
This isn’t Da Mao’s first foray into viral fandom.
AFeb. 2014 video of the giant panda playing in the snow earned almost six million views.
That video is second in popularity only to a polar bear cub’s first steps, which earned well over 6.5 million views.
The Toronto Zoo stays open during the winter and, depending on the weather, Da Mao and other animals can be found romping around in the snow.
“What pandas do here at the zoo is very similar to what they do in the wild. They eat, eat, eat,” Franke said.
“They need to expend as little energy as possible to digest (food) . . . so they sleep.”