Your morning adorable: Styan’s red panda cub at Canada’s Edmonton Valley Zoo

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The Edmonton Valley Zoo in Alberta, Canada, welcomed the birth of a rare Styan’s red panda cub on June 13. The baby, a female named Sha-lei, is healthy and ‘doing everything she’s supposed to do at her age,’ animal health technologist Sandy Heiliker told the Edmonton Sun.

Heiliker is shouldering most of the work of raising Sha-lei, who was removed from her mother’s care shortly after birth. (Sha-lei was taken from her mother for safety reasons, the zoo reports, over fears that the mother was too aggressive in her cleaning of the baby and could potentially harm her.)

Styan’s red pandas are one of two subspecies of red panda; they’re slightly larger than the more familiar western red panda. Both subspecies are native to the Himalayan region of Asia, and both are endangered, due primarily to deforestation.

More photos after the jump!

-- Lindsay Barnett