Article content

When Calgary Zoo officials scoured the world looking for an experienced panda keeper, little did they expect to find one in their own backyard.

Yet Cissy Kou was exactly what the zoo hoped to find — someone with extensive experience looking after pandas.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Labour of love for Calgary's panda keeper Back to video

And the 41-year-old keeper was already living in Calgary, having returned from Hong Kong to the city where she’d attended high school and university.

She’d returned to Calgary because of her mom’s health, never expecting to resume her career looking after the rare species she’d first fallen in love with years earlier on the other side of the world.

Kou was hired as lead keeper by the zoo last summer in anticipation of the arrival of the four pandas — adults Da Mao and Er Shun, and cubs Jia Panpan (Canadian Hope) and Jia Yueyue (Canadian Joy) — for the animals’ much-anticipated scheduled five-year stay in Calgary.

On Friday, the four bears will finally arrive and soon be in her charge. The bears will be flown from Toronto, where they have been a major hit since the adults arrived from China in the spring of 2013, with the cubs born on Canadian soil following artificial insemination two years later.