How does a panda celebrate his birthday? At the National Zoo, it’s by living out every four-year-old’s dream: cake for breakfast.
Today, Bao Li, the giant male panda at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, turned four. It marks his first birthday since arriving in DC in October 2024. Zookeepers presented Bao Li with a special panda-friendly fruitsicle cake.
Bao Li seemed to enjoy the fruity, multi-tiered treat. His cake-eating strategy was fairly simple: get the good stuff first. He used his claws to slice off the fruits on top, including apples, carrots, sweet potatoes, and blueberries, which are some of his favorite treats. And while you normally wouldn’t let a four-year-old eat the candles on his birthday cake, Bao Li was able to snarf down the four sugar cane “candles” with gusto.
His keepers presented him with the fruity confection at 9 AM, but a sizable crowd of well-wishers gathered before that. They watched him snuffle around, grazing on a pre-cake bamboo breakfast, and sang him “Happy Birthday” when the cake arrived.
Among the attendees was Sonya Eddins, who regularly watches the National Zoo’s panda cam in the evenings—a broadcast video feed of Bao Li and Qing Bao’s daily movements. She was decked out with a panda ears headband for the occasion and thoroughly enjoyed the birthday party.
“I love the panda bears, they’re just my favorite,” she said. “I watch them a lot on the panda cam, and they’re so playful. I like how Bao Li does a lot of backflips and plays with the balls.”
Bao Li has an outgoing, playful, and curious personality. He often calls to his keepers with a “bleat” greeting, according to the zoo. In captivity, pandas tend to live around 30 years. So, at four years old, Bao Li has already hit adolescence, and the way he hoovered his cake today, after spending the preceding hour grazing on bamboo, was classic continually hungry teenage boy behavior.
His future mate, Qing Bao—who shared a brief flirtation with him this spring—did not get any cake, but she’ll just need to be patient. Her birthday is next month. In the meantime, if you missed the birthday party this morning, you can watch today’s panda cam rebroadcast on the National Zoo’s website this evening.
