Bamboo the Wonder Weed

Foraging Ahead is trying to create a consumable foraging feeder-toy that will encourage the birds to chew the feeder up in order to get to the food items inside VS manipulating the food items like our PVC feeder-toy. Recently, after many hours of working with the grass I decided to hop on the good 'ole internet and learn a little bit more about it.

It is difficult to cut bamboo. A wood scrolling blade for a jigsaw creates too much friction burning the bamboo before it cuts through the moist fresh stalk. Cutting the partitions at the naturally occurring nodes with a large miter saw works for creating an effective bottom but we could not come up with an efficient way of cutting holes into the stalk to spark the bird's curiosity by giving it a bird's eye view.

Hoping to find pointers on working with bamboo in an artistic sense without using toxic chemicals, I came across a Giant Panda Crisis.

Surprisingly, this grass that has a reputation of taking over a garden is also a major cause of the declining Giant Panda population in China. "Most of the pandas' favorite arrow bamboo in a 217,000 square-mile region of Sichuan province is going through a once-in-60-year cycle of flowering and dying before regenerating," said Yang Xuyu, deputy head of the province's Wild Animal Preservation Station. So, the Pandas are relocating. China saw a huge Panda die-off in the mountainous regions of Sichuan.

Nature is incredible. Now when I am making the 2hr drive back from our Bamboo supplier I think of the hungry Pandas. Giant Pandas only eat bamboo, bamboo only regenerates every 60 years. That species has been boxed in an evolutionary corner.

For this reason, kudos to the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). I saw the Giant Pandas at Zoo Atlanta.

Birds still have my heart and always will, but I am grateful for the opportunity to have seen a Giant Panda safely from just feet away. *The USA does not own any Panda. The People's Republic of China leases them out for $1,000,000 a year* As I gazed at the baby I wondered if China would use her to be reintroduced into the wild.

As far as the bamboo drama goes, the solution has been found. We now have holes in the bamboo. Shortly we should have this product listed on our website, but our birds have some usability testing to do. No one has a free-ride in this household.