Spring is properly here, potent, pollinated, fecund. The garden is electric with sex and postcoital doings: sparrows are shagging on the roof, nests are being frenetically constructed and grubs transported to nesting mamas. I spend my days voyeuristically peeping at tits (I got a nestcam for my birthday and I’m obsessed). Even educated fleas are doing it and I dread to imagine what filth the squirrels are up to.
I tell you who isn’t doing it, though: Mao Sun and Xing Er, the Copenhagen zoo pandas. Since their arrival in 2019, the pair haven’t managed to mate. This is my third year tuning in to the intense will-they-won’t-they soap opera, shared by keeper Nadja Søndergaard on her extremely entertaining Instagram account @thegoodbearsandme. The pandas are solitary creatures, only coming together for Mao Sun’s 36-hour oestrus window. But to maximise their chances of actually having sex, there’s a whole elaborate lead-up of letting them see each other, swapping enclosures, spreading urine and “secretions”, and checking for the telltale tail raise that shows Mao Sun’s hormones are peaking.
“Date 2025” started promisingly, with the bears following each other around, sniffing and engaging in some light erotic wrestling. However, rather than getting it on, they proceeded to spend most of the ensuing period playing chase, somersaulting away from each other while squeaking like Teletubbies, eating bamboo at opposite ends of the enclosure and napping. It was, frankly, farcical – but we’ve all had dates like that, I suppose.
Everyone has a theory about panda libido, but surely we can all agree humans are most of the problem. If we’d left their habitat alone, their sex lives would be private panda business, as they should be. As for these two Scandinavian specimens, my best friend wonders whether they’ve joined the South Korean “no sex, no kids” 4B movement: “Perhaps some of their ancestors strayed on to the Korean peninsula and developed a taste for celibacy?” I assumed they just didn’t fancy each other, but watching, it felt more like they don’t know what to do. Panda pornography may make it worse, but how about some plain-speaking panda sex ed?
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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