The Celebrity At The Zoo

Almost everybody loves Pandas. After a year documenting a newborn cub, a photographer remembers when she did too.

- Rebecca Hale

In almost every photo from our 1986 family vacation to Washington, D.C., I am showing off the souvenir I picked out from the gift shop at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo—a white, oversize, cotton sweatshirt with puff-paint pandas dancing on the front. I was nine years old, and pandas were cool. Not even midsummer heat could deter me from keeping that sweatshirt on throughout the trip.

I remember very little from the vacation, aside from the thrill of being at the zoo and seeing the giant pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing—star attractions on the tourist circuit. The following year Ling-Ling gave birth to twin cubs. The babies didn’t survive, but I don’t remember learning that as a kid.

Nearly 30 years later I found myself in the midst of a pool of photojournalists and video crews packed into the panda enclosure. A small cub named Bei Bei was being presented to the world, and I was covering it for National Geographic. The closest I’d come to photographing a subject that generated this level of frenzied enthusiasm was when Angelina Jolie visited the National Geographic Society headquarters for an event.

I confess that my childhood love of pandas hadn’t lasted. I lived in D.C. by then. The pandas were just another item to mark off the tourist checklist, and photographing a new cub was part of my job. But I also had children, and, as most parents in the Washington area do, I’d take them regularly to the National Zoo.