Why I can’t stop watching two pandas not have sex | Emma Beddinton

Despite all Copenhagen zoo's best efforts, pandas Mao Sun and Xing Er have been playing chase, squeaking, wrestling and napping - doing everything but procreate

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 Sondergaard 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.