Flying home two years late
Yang Guang and Tian Tian, two 20 year old giant pandas which arrived in the UK in December 2011, left Edinburgh earlier this week on a China Southern Cargo flight.
During their stay at Edinburgh Zoo as part of a ten-year agreement between the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and the China Wildlife Conservation Association, which was extended during the pandemic, they were not able to procreate.
To increase their chances from the beginning by making them feel more comfortable in their new homes, RZSS staff were joining them to Chengdu. They will undergo a quarantine period before being transferred to a permanent home in Sichuan province.
The pair are not the first to return from overseas this year. And Le Le, a two-year-old panda born in Singapore, is also scheduled to return to China soon. (ah)