Sichuan Wuolong Natural Reserve Area, China

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Wolong Natural Reserve Area

The Scenic Area of the Wuolong Natural Reserve Area is located in the Wenchuan County of Sichuan Province, about 136 km away from Chengdu.

As an important protected Natural Reserve Area listed by the state, Wuolong Nature Reserve lies in the valleys of east Qiong Lai Mountain.

The whole area is about 200,000 hectares and the average elevation is more than 4,000 meters. As it is between the Sichuan Basin and the Qingzang Highland, it has more than 3,000 different plants.

More than 40 of them are especially valuable. It is the biggest natural reserve area of China and all the creatures of it are perfectly reserved.

There are many valuable animals living in the area like panda and Jisi monkey. Institutes and observation stations of panda were settling in the area. The ancestry of panda that appeared in the world about 12,000,000 years ago, they ate meat only.

About 600,000 years ago, they had evolved like today's panda, so panda is a kind of "living fossil". Now, panda eats bamboo mainly. An adult panda eats more than 20-kg fresh bamboo everyday. Sometimes they will have meat like rats in the bamboo forest or they will come into the houses of local people and find some meat to eat.

Pandas like to live alone. They sleep during the daytime and go out at night. When the season changed, they will change their living places. In spring, they will have their houses in the bamboo forest whose elevation is more than 3,000 meters high.

In summer, areas with a great many fresh bamboo and without lots of sunshine are the best choice. In autumn, they will have their houses on the hills whose elevation is about 2,500 meters and have a great deal of sunshine. Such kind of place will help them pass the long winter.

Since the Wuolong Natural Reserve Area has many different high areas for panda changing their homes, it became a favorite living place of them.

Besides the rare animals, there are different plants living in the area, from bottom to the top of the area, there are plants from subtropics, temperate zone and frigid zone. Since plants from different zones can be, see in the area, it became a national reserve area listed by the United Nations.