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Giant Pandas, sometimes called panda bears or just pandas, are a type of bear native only to China.

They live in narrow mountainous regions.

ike bears, pandas have carnivorous teeth and a meat eater’s digestive system. In spite of that, 99% of their diet consists of bamboo. Because of the poor nutritional value of bamboo, average giant pandas eat as much as 20 to 30 pounds of bamboo shoots a day. Wild pandas occasionally eat other grasses, tubers, and sometimes meat like fish or birds, but such things are rare. Captive pandas' diets have more variety, but bamboo is still their mainstay. Their digestive tracks can't break down cellulose, but gut bacteria similar to the kind in herbivore bodies have been found.

In order to provide adequate nutrition, pandas eat different kinds of bamboo at different times of the year, migrating to be in the right place as the right kinds of bamboo are sprouting. Poor nutrition prevents pandas from hibernating.

In spite of their sedentary lives, pandas do get around.

Pandas begin to reproduce when they are four to eight years old and may be active until they are 20. The mating season is March through May when females go into estrus. That only lasts two to three days each year. Males in captivity are notoriously reluctant to do their part, so researchers have developed a panda form of Viagra. It is that or use artificial insemination.

Panda embryos stay in a state of arrested development in the mothers' uteruses until sufficient nutrition has built up for the babies to have a chance of survival. New born pandas weigh a little over 3 ounces and are blind. Pandas frequently have twin births. In the wild, usually only one survives.

Newborn pandas nurse frequently. It takes about a month for the black and white pattern to appear. At three months, they weigh just 11 pounds.

These twins, born in a zoo in France, are four months old.

A survey in the 1980s found only 1,114 pandas in china, but by 2014, the number had grown to 1,864 in the wild with 500 held in zoos around the world, mostly in China. Though the numbers are growing, pandas are seriously threatened, mostly due to habitat loss. 

Pandas eat a variety of bamboo types. One of the two species most favored by them is the arrow bamboo (Pseudosasa japonica) (metake in Japanese). It got its name from its use by Japanese samurai who made arrow shafts from its stiff, slender stalks.

The other type of bamboo most favored by pandas is the black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra). Besides feeding pandas, black bamboo is used for lumber, musical instruments, and human food.

Bamboo is one of the shikunshi painting subjects and is typically representative of summer in paintings.

In Japan, a bamboo forest sometimes surrounds Shinto shrines as part of a sacred barrier against evil. Many Buddhist temples also have bamboo groves like Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyōto.

There are two types of bears native to Japan, and neither of them are pandas. That is probably why I have been unable to find Japanese artwork earlier than the 20th century featuring pandas. In lieu of that is a photo of an Ainu carving of a bear. The Ainu are a different race than most Japanese. They have some Caucasian features but originally migrated from northern Asia thousands of years ago. They live on Japan's northern-most main island of Hokkaido. The Ainu are famous for their wooden animal carvings.

Tosa Mitsunobu (1434 – 1525)

Mitsunobu was the founder of the Tosa school of Japanese art during the Muromachi Period (1338 – 1573). The Tosa school primarily catered to the tastes of the aristocracy with traditional Japanese themes. The pair of 6-fold byōbu below features bamboo in all four seasons.

Itō Jakuchū (1716 – 1800)

Jakuchū is today considered to be one of a collection of eccentric Japanese artists who broke with the traditions of their times. Though he often painted traditional subjects, he was an early Japanese experimenter of perspective. He is best known for his paintings of chickens. His fan-shaped bamboo painting below is a print.