Trevor Zoo red pandas enjoy the season

MILLBROOK — A few small furry residents of Millbrook have become famous doing what comes naturally to them — playing in the snow. The celebrities are a red panda family — Hope and her two cubs, Faith and MowMow — and they live at the Trevor Zoo at Millbrook School. During recent storm Juno, a live-streaming video camera picked up the two cubs having the time of their lives in the snow; viewers found them irresistible and the footage went viral.If you haven’t seen them yet, you can watch them day or night on a webcam by going to www.millbrook.org/TrevorZooLive. Or you can visit the zoo and hope to find them out in the snow. When you get to the zoo, follow the path until you come to the bamboo.At the end of January with the big storm Juno coming, by chance, a reporter at Reuters checked Trevor Zoo’s live-streaming video camera and saw the red pandas. Reuters called the zoo and said they’d like to show the pandas having fun in the snow, a break from all the doom and gloom in the news of the approaching blizzard.Numerous major media outlets have shared footage of the red panda cubs, including The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, Euronews and The Toronto Star. Buzzfeed included them in “14 Animal Cams That Are Better Than TV.” New York Magazine included them in “8 Actually Good Things That Happened This Week,” a week which started with a winter storm and ended with bitter cold temperatures.“It’s been shown in China, Germany and England. It’s quite exciting for us,” said Alan Tousignant, director of the Trevor Zoo.“They certainly seem to like the snow,” said Tousignant.He hypothesized that the snow is softer than the hard ground and a lot of fun to play in when they go outside to eat their favorite snack, bamboo.Red pandas are very skillful and acrobatic animals that predominantly stay in trees in the wild, evident after watching them either online or in person. These panda celebrities have free access to an outside enclosure with trees, as well as their inside area.Shortly after the cubs were born on June 11, 2014, a camera was installed by their nest box.“The nest box camera was critical when they were babies,” said Tousignant.“It allowed us to monitor them, but not to disturb them. A lot of our nervousness was put to ease by having the camera.”There are now three live-streaming video cameras set up: one in their outside area, one in the inside and one in their nest box, where they are spending less and less time.“There’s a lot we don’t know about the red panda in the wild, they are very secretive,” said Tousignant. The red panda is native to the eastern Himalayas and southwestern China. “Wherever you have the large Bamboo forests, you’ll find giant and red pandas.”The red panda is classified as a vulnerable species — there are fewer than 10,000 left in the wild and they face a high risk of extinction. The population continues to decline as their habitat is destroyed.“The hope is by having the animals here people learn about them and they also start to think about conservation,” said Tousignant.The zoo is a resource for the science department at the Millbrook School and currently 73 students have husbandry duties to help care for the 180 exotic and indigenous animals, including the red pandas. Trevor Zoo is an AZA (Association of Zoos and Aquariums) accredited facility. The zoo is open to the public, in addition to giving students a unique hands-on learning opportunity about the natural world.In fact, the recent fame of the red pandas has it’s origins in a student project.“It all started last spring when we set up a webcam on a great blue heron’s nest for a senior year project,” said Tousignant.When the camera was mounted 86 feet up in a spruce tree, no small undertaking, the school began streaming live video of the nest at www.millbrook.org/TrevorZooLive and people watched.People watched this time, too, the world over, and they eagerly await more red panda escapades in the snow.