What noises does a panda make?

A red panda encounter is rare in the wild as they are nocturnal by habit and extremely shy. This bear-like animal is known to communicate through scent-marking noises. However, as it is difficult to catch a look at these bear-like animals or hear them communicate in the forest, doesn’t it raise curiosity? Have you asked yourself, “what do red pandas sound like?”

Red pandas make a wide range of noises for communication. The most common sound they make is a “growling” or “grunting” noise that sounds similar to a mixture of a pig’s snort and a duck’s quack. It is a sound they make when they get excited. The other noises they make are “bark”, “hoot”, “squeal”, “bleat”, and “Twitter”.

Clearly, red pandas make a variety of noises to communicate and express themselves. Though they make a lot of sounds, most of them are highly quiet. 

Stay tuned to find out what other sounds the red pandas make during their daily life.

What is a Huff Quack?

Huff Quack is the sound red pandas make when they get excited. The sound is so-called as the noise sounds like a mix of a pig’s snorting noise and a duck’s quacking. 

When a red panda fights or gets excited, they never groan like a giant panda. They generally make soft squealing noises. You might not even hear a huff quack sound in the wild as the pandas are really quiet. Apart from these noises, they communicate with their body language.

What Other Sounds do Red Pandas Make?

As mentioned earlier, red pandas make several sounds for communication. Each of these calls is very quiet. But they are distinct and denote different emotions and actions.

Bark

Red pandas make a high-pitched barking noise when they feel challenged or threatened. This sound is very similar to a dog’s bark, the only difference here is the pitch of the sound. Barking is also a way of alerting other pandas in the wild about a predator attack.

So, if you hear bark while passing through a forest, stay alert. You might catch a glance of a panda in the wild, who felt threatened by your presence in their habitat.

Hiss

Red pandas sometimes make a hissing noise like raccoons. It is a call for a challenge when two pandas fight among themselves. Though these creatures are shy and quiet, the red pandas under captivity often make hissing noises at their handler during feeding or when they are unwell.

Grunt

The grunting noise red pandas make, sound similar to the groaning noise made by giant pandas. Apart from barking and hissing, red pandas grunt when they feel threatened or simply scared.

Hoot

A hoot is an alarm or warning call for red pandas. The noise sounds like the hoot of an owl. The sounds are so identical that often travelers mistake a hoot of a red panda for an owl’s cry.

Squeal

Squealing is common for both adult and baby red pandas. Their squeal sounds similar to any squeaky plastic toy. The baby red pandas use their squeal to express their hunger. Whereas, adult red pandas squeal when they are in pain or are hurt.

Bleat and Twitter

Red pandas are known to bleat or twitter along with their scent marking habits during their mating season. It is a high-pitched mating call that the adult red pandas use for attracting their partners. Irrespective of the shrill noise they make, they manage to keep nature at peace.

Do Red Pandas Bark?

Yes. Red pandas make a high-pitched groaning, barking noise when they face any danger or a threatening situation in the wild. 

However, even their bark is quiet, and all you get to hear is quiet exhaling in most cases. They will only bark when there is danger. In most cases, we get red pandas in secluded and noise-free areas where there are fewer chances of threat. Hence, hearing them bark in the wild is rare. 

They typically bark to alert other red pandas when they get preyed upon by snow leopards or similar big cats in the wild.

Are Red Pandas Quiet?

Yes. Being shy and solitary animals, red pandas generally remain quiet with mild vocalization. Though they make a wide variety of noises for communicating, they are mostly inaudible to the human ear.

Despite being quiet, naturalists sometimes refer to them as “firefoxes” because of their mysterious and elusive nature. They maintain silence in the forest and prefer to reside in peaceful thickly forested areas to stay hidden. To keep up with their reputation of being quiet, red pandas become active in the early mornings or late afternoons when the surroundings become quiet.

Final Thoughts

Red pandas are quiet, solitary animals that make many noises for communication along with head bobbing and scent marking. Though they don’t grunt like a giant panda or hiss like raccoons, they make a squealing noise as they get excited, that sounds like a mix of a pig’s snorting and duck’s quacking. This sound is common as the “huff quack.”

There are other variations of call, like bleating, twittering, barking, and more. Irrespective of the noises they make, these sounds are generally inaudible to human ears in the wild. Thus, we grow more curious about these adorable pandas.

If you found the article interesting, share it with your red panda lover friends. 

A great frustration for those who study natural history is that the sounds made by almost every extinct creature that ever lived will never be heard by human ears. The best we know of the call of the dodo, for instance, is that, perhaps, its name was an onomatopoeic allusion to a two-noted pigeon-like “cooo”. Likewise, the best we know of the great auk, a flightless penguin-like bird of the northern hemisphere, is that it may or may not have made a “gurgling noise when anxious”. My favourite of these extinct sounds is that of the Huia, a charming long-billed New Zealand bird which, although last seen in 1907, managed to stow its song into modernity because an elderly Maori man could remember the song from his childhood and recite it 50 years later, whistling it in front of audiences still saddened by its loss.

Thankfully this is unlikely to be the case should pandas ever face extinction, for in recent decades scientists have worked hard to record and study their vocal repertoire. As far as I can ascertain, this all started in the 1960s with a note in Men and Pandas, by Ramona and Desmond Morris, that when Chi-Chi (the zoo’s resident female panda) was in sexual heat “it was only necessary to open the den door when she was inside her sleeping quarters and hold a microphone towards her to produce repeated loud calling”. The book does not go into much detail about why this might be, bypassing the truly tragic possibility that Chi-Chi’s confused sexual tastes may have by this point included fluffy microphones and television zoologists. Still, the book was on to something, for many of the calls that pandas make did in fact turn out to be intimately linked to their reproductive cycles.

More recent studies, particularly in the last 10 years, have picked out a number of predictable noises that pandas can produce. In fact, they may be capable of more than 10 calls. Here are a few of the most common, should you ever find yourself face to face with one in the wild or, more likely, on the internet.

When reaching their most fertile stage, bleating comes out capitalised. “I AM READY FOR SEX,” a panda may be saying

The first thing you should know about pandas is that they bleat. Yes, they bleat … although it isn’t a bleat like you or know it. It sounds rather like the kind of bleat that Jar Jar Binks would come out with, had the character’s dialogue been mercifully removed from the Star Wars films and replaced with bleating. In other words, the bleating is charismatic and expressive but a bit annoying after a short time. In human language, you could say that this bleating means “Hi, I am ready for sex,” if you were speaking to someone who literally could not understand the ways that animals work without imagining them to be like us.

Interestingly, it may be that the pitch and frequency of panda bleating seems to change in females according to their stage of oestrus. When reaching their most fertile stage (to continue the anthropocentric thread here) their bleating comes out capitalised. “I AM READY FOR SEX,” a female panda may be saying at these times. It’s worth noting that bleating is apparently used by pandas in other situations, like attracting the attention of babies or telling zookeepers you feel hungry. Desmond Morris had a get-out, in other words.

Another sound that pandas make is a kind of throaty honking noise, which is used during stressful situations. Then there’s a dog-like barking noise, interspersed with a long howling moan during the non-breeding season (which might mean “BACK OFF”). Then there’s the high-pitched and whining noise they make as the breeding season approaches. Then there are the “cuckoos” and “woo woos” and “creaks” about which scientists are still learning, and which may have something to do with bonding cubs with mothers.

If pandas ever do face extinction at least we will be able, through a library of recordings, to hold on to the suite of noises they make. At least our studies can continue should they leave. It was never that way for auks or dodos.

Yet there is a sting in the tail of this piece. Much of what we know about pandas is based on captive or semi-captive populations, and knowledge of their calls is no different. Do they make all these calls in the wild, where no observers are tracking them with microphones? Likewise, do captive pandas use their calls in the same way their ancestors once did? This is a beguiling thought, for what if the pandas are weaving us a story that doesn’t truly represent their historical skill-set? What if our scientific knowledge of their communications become based on unintentionally corrupted captive populations? What if we, like an audience in front of the whistling Maori man, are putting our trust in a wild song we may have long ago lost?

We may never know, of course, and so we must keep our minds open to the secrets that wild populations may have. For there, undoubtedly, pandas have more to tell us.

Jules Howard is a zoologist and the author of Sex on Earth and Death on Earth