ATLANTA — As Zoo Atlanta welcomes a newborn pair of panda cubs, the staff will have to say goodbye to panda twins born there three years ago.%
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Channel 2's Berndt Petersen was at the giant panda exhibit Monday where both sets of twins were getting lots of attention
For now, the newborns can be seen only on a TV monitor. They're being held in a kind of intensive care unit which zoo officials say is standard procedure.
Veterinarians told Petersen the first 72 hours of life are the most critical for the pandas, and they're almost there.
Many consider a face-to-face with a giant panda, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But for Chris and Jen Reece, they’ve now had that experience twice.
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“We went to China a few years ago, and got to see pandas at the Beijing Zoo," Chris Reece told Petersen.
Monday, they saw Zoo Atlanta’s newest additions, after the weekend births of Cub A and Cub B.
The zoo said the baby pandas won't be named until they're 100 days old, per Chinese tradition.
The births come just one day before the giant panda was taken off the endangered species list.
“It's a real conservation success story, but we don't want people to think we don't need a big effort to conserve giant pandas still," said Dr. Hayley Murphy, with Zoo Atlanta.%
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Murphy told Petersen the panda bear population is now classified as vulnerable, nowhere near being out of the woods from extinction.
"I really don't want people to think that the effort has stopped now. If anything, we need more effort," Murphy said.
But as conservation efforts in the wild have succeeded, so has breeding in zoos.
These latest set of twins are the second pair born here.
Officials say the twins’ big sisters will be returned to China this fall, so time to see them is running out.
Giving even more meaning to Chris and Jen Reece's second once-in-a-lifetime.
“And actually as we were driving up, because we talked about going to the zoo, I saw on Facebook that they had baby pandas, and I was like, ‘OK, we'll go to the zoo and see the pandas,’" Jen Reece said.
Veterinarians say the first public viewing of the newborn cubs probably won’t happen until December.
Cox Media Group
