A giant panda can be pickier than a queen about food, Zoo Atlanta of the United States has found.

The zoo has hired four full-time bamboo hunters to find and harvest local patches of bamboo to satisfy the palates of its panda pair, Lun Lun and Yang Yang, native to China's Sichuan Province, according to media reports on Thursday.

The animals' diet consists almost entirely of bamboo, but they will eat only about 20 of the 200 or so species that grow in Georgia. Moreover, what type they like varies from time to time.

Zoo Atlanta keeps files on what types of bamboo the pandas eat each day, but the animals often change their minds.

"You have to kind of play it by ear," said Rytis Daujotas, one of the bamboo hunters. "It's a good thing we have elephants. What pandas don't like, elephants like."

The bamboo has to be fresh, and must be free of chemicals, bird droppings or other animal feces, which can be toxic to the pandas. Most important, it must be appetizing.

The Atlanta zoo could grow its own, but that would not be very practical, given the pandas' ever-changing tastes.

"They might eat golden bamboo from Mr. Smith's yard but they won't eat it from Mr. Jones' yard," said Jan Fortune, manager of the zoo's animal nutrition department.

The black-and-white animals eat up to 13.5 kilograms of bamboo a day each. The leaves and stalks account for about 95 percent of their diet. (They also get soy biscuits and apples as treats.)

The bamboo hunters have to haul in about 180 kilograms of bamboo each week for the pandas and a few other zoo animals, such as the elephants and gorillas.

The team works five days a week harvesting bamboo from the yards of homes and businesses on a list of about 1,500 approved donors within 161 kilometers of Atlanta. And they cannot use power tools because any oil or gas residue would poison the pandas. The hand-held saw and lopper are greased with cooking oil after being disinfected every day.

The bamboo hunters will find their jobs tougher in nine months when the zoo's panda cub Mei Lan moves from Lun Lun's milk to the stalk.

The cub was born on Sept. 6 to mother panda Lun Lun with artificially inseminated sperm from panda Yang Yang.

Source:Xinhua/Agencies