Its range extends through Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Burma, and Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in western China. The panda lives at elevations from 2,000 to 4,800 meters. Here, the weather is cool and moist with a mixture of deciduous and coniferous trees above, and bamboo and rhododendrons below. In the wild, red pandas eat mostly bamboo leaves. They supplement this diet with berries, mushrooms, grasses and bark.
Red pandas do eat some meat.
They eat insects, bird eggs, bird nestlings, and may even catch an occasional mouse or bamboo rat. The panda can grasp bamboo stalks with a specialized wrist bone called the radial sesamoid. This bone acts as sort of thumb. This means it can not get the most from its low calorie diet. They must spend a large portion of the day feeding.