The family of animals at Beijing Zoo grew on Friday with the arrival of a pair of panda babies at about 10:00 AM.

They were the first pandas to be born at the zoo since 2003, according to Beijing Times.

One of the twins is still at the zoo, being cared for by its parents, while the other was sent to Ya'an in Sichuan Province where its parents, Gugu and Yinghua, were born.

Pandas typically care for one twin and abandon the other, necessitating the move.

"The 109-gram baby panda sent to us, which does not yet have a name, is probably a male but its gender cannot be definitively worked out by us until it is around three years old," a worker with the Ya'an-based China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda told local media.

The baby panda in Sichuan is being fed with milk from its grandmother that the center had collected and frozen. Baby pandas need breast milk to improve their immunity during the first three days of life.

The baby panda will eventually be sent back to the zoo, once it has developed.

The mother panda and her baby in Beijing are receiving care from experts in the delivery room at the zoo and will not meet tourists for the time being, according to a worker at the zoo.

(China Daily July 5, 2010)