The Society of Wilderness yesterday lauded the success of a project it launched last year in conjunction with Citibank to restore the ecosystem of Taipei County’s Wugu (五股) wetlands.
The two organizations unveiled the results of their conservation work over the past year and said that the numbers of migrant birds and other forms of wildlife had increased substantially.
“Wetlands are the origins of human life. The conservation efforts are not only for the migrant birds that reside there, but for the wellbeing of all life on Earth,” said Hsieh Hwey-lian (謝蕙蓮), a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s biodiversity research center.
In recent years, climate change had begun to seriously affect the chances of survival of much of the wildlife, she said.
“Many species of fish and birds reproduce or migrate according to the rhythm of nature. Once that rhythm is disturbed it is hard for them to adapt,” Hsieh said.
“Since we adopted the Wugu wetlands with Citibank, we have made a lot of effort improving the habitat for migrant birds. We have also done research on an endangered type of damselfly, the Mortonagrion hirosei Asahina,” society vice president Lai Jung-hsiao (賴榮孝) said.
Last year, the damselfly was spotted at the Wugu wetlands for the first time in many years, Lai said, adding that the number of migrant birds visiting the wetlands had also increased.
Lai said the organization was happy with the results so far, especially since the society has also taken 7,400 people on guided tours of the wetlands over the past year to teach them how the wellbeing of wetlands is relevant to humans.
As for the future, Lai called on the government to place all the wetlands along the Tamsui River — including Waziwei (挖仔尾), Hongshulin (紅樹林), Wugu and Huachiang Park (華江) — into one conservation area.
“When a migrant bird comes to Taiwan, it does not distinguish between Taipei City and Taipei County. To a bird, habitable wetland is habitable wetland,” Lai said.
If only part of the wetlands is habitable, birds will be cramped into a small area, seriously affecting their ability to reproduce, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching