BANGKOK - Chinese experts flew to Thailand on Thursday to examine a one-day-old panda cub whose birth came as a welcome surprise to zoo officials who tried unsuccessfully for years to breed the rare mammal.
Prasertsak Boontrakulpoonthawee, who heads the Chiang Mai Zoo's panda section, said the cub and mother were doing well. Thailand joins the United States and Japan as the only countries outside of China to breed a panda in captivity.
"They are still healthy and strong, both mom and baby. There's nothing to worry about," Prasertsak said. "Whatever we can do to care for the pandas, we have already done. We would like to hear from the experts about what else needs to be done."
Prasertsak said the Chinese experts will try to separate the cub from its mother, weigh the baby and determine its sex. The adult pandas were lent to Thailand from China in 2003.
The birth was featured on the front pages of many Thai newspapers, which carried photos of the pinkish cub so tiny that it could be held in the hands of a zoo staffer. Others pictures showed the hulking mother Lin Hui gently holding her baby.
Chiang Mai zoo officials resorted to sometimes-comical strategies to get the two pandas to mate over the past six years. They held a mock wedding for the pair, separated them to spark a little romance and then put the male, Chuang Chuang, on a diet to entice Lin Hui.
When that didn't work, they started showing Chuang Chuang "porn" videos of pandas mating, and finally turned to artificial insemination.
Zoo staff artificially inseminated the 7-year-old Lin Hui on Feb. 18 but did not know she was pregnant, Chiang Mai Zoo's director Thananpat Pongamorn said.
Staff had been monitoring her hormone levels in recent weeks and noticed they were rising. But the image on the ultrasound May 11 was not clear, and they couldn't make out a fetus. Panda births are difficult to predict and reports of false pregnancies are common.
"She's been anxious since yesterday. She did not want to get close to caretakers or any other people, but we didn't know what the problem was," Thananpat told The Associated Press late Wednesday.
Lin Hui started licking her backside and exhibiting pain in her stomach early in the morning and then gave birth to the cub, which appeared healthy and immediately began screeching loudly, Thananpat said.
"It is an ultimate happiness to see the baby panda," Thananpat said. "We are so happy that we can breed a panda from artificial insemination. Every staff at the zoo is proud and I think every Thai will be proud too."
Sophon Dumnui, director of the Zoological Park Organization, which oversees the country's zoos, told Channel 3 television Wednesday that Lin Hui was "very fond of her baby."
"She cuddles, licks and holds the baby very carefully all the time," he said. "She knows how to be a mother even though she has never been one before."
Breeding pandas is a common practice in China where dozens are born by artificial insemination each year. But it is a rare occurrence outside of the country.
Pandas are threatened by loss of habitat, poaching and a low reproduction rate. Females in the wild normally have a cub once every two to three years. The fertility of captive giant pandas is even lower, experts said.
Only about 1,600 pandas live in the wild, mostly in China's southwestern Sichuan province, which was hit by an earthquake last year that killed nearly 70,000 people. An additional 120 are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos, and about 20 live in zoos outside China.
Suzanne Braden, the director of the Colorado-based conservation group Pandas International, called the cub's birth in Thailand "superb news and important to the preservation of the species."
"With such small numbers, every panda birth is extremely significant -- especially after the devastation following the 2008 (earthquake in) Sichuan Province, home to the giant pandas," Braden said in an e-mail interview.
