Giant pandas live in a national reserve in China's Mountains of the Sleeping Dragon, home to more than 100 of the animals, one of the most endangered species on the planet. The film tracks the pressure on that population directly: shrinking habitat from human encroachment makes it harder for pandas to find mates, and each one needs to eat roughly half its body weight in bamboo daily just to get enough nutrition from a plant that offers very little. Cameras catch a mating pair and follow through to a successful birth, with footage of a newborn cub. The reserve's other bamboo-eaters get screen time too, including a red panda and a bamboo rat raising her young. One sequence lingers on a Chinese giant salamander from the area's streams, a species that can grow to six feet long. The film stays close to its subjects and their daily survival rather than narrating broader conservation policy, letting the mating, birth, and feeding footage carry the story.