Panda Bear Twins Born In Atlanta

Buffalo has its pair of polar bears. Atlanta has a pair of panda bears – they’re twins and they were born on Monday, two minutes apart. They’re the first panda twins born in America in 26 years.

But to keep both of them alive the Atlanta Zoo has to trick the mother because the natural instinct for pandas when twins are born is to ignore one of them and let it die while caring for the other. So the zoo switches the two every couple of hours and puts the other one in an incubator.

They’re delicate to begin with. At birth panda cubs are only 3 to 5 ounces. It’s a big deal when pandas give birth because there’s only about 2,000 of them in the entire world, 300 of them are in zoos and most of them in China. The rest of them are in the wild.

The Atlanta Zoo has a Panda Cam that you can view 24 hours a day. And every couple of hours they move it while they swap out the cubs.  It's also where you can see the incredible birth of one of the pandas.

The baby pandas will go on public display this fall.