He has crashed into a mountain ditch, smashed into a cliff, come face-to-face with a deadly bamboo viper and nearly frozen to death on a mountaintop pursuing his lifelong passion, but he has never been deterred by any of those near fatal experiences — or by opposition from his family.
Tsai Bae-chun (蔡百峻), a photographer better known as “Mr Butterfly,” has been chasing butterflies around for more than 30 years.
He fell in love with butterflies as a child, catching them and framing them in a book to preserve their beauty. But that interest did not become a burning obsession until 1979, when Tsai, at the age of 29, witnessed “in awe” the metamorphosis of a butterfly while visiting a friend in Hualien.
He said he saw a bunch of eggs hatch the first night, turn into caterpillars on the wall a few days later and then become pupa before emerging as colorful butterflies, an experience that left him obsessed with the fragile insect.
Tsai said he read every book he could lay his hands on to learn about the species. But compared with Japanese reference books on Taiwan’s butterflies, locally published books seemed “slipshod,” he said.
Taiwan at the time was focused solely on rapid economic growth, but after seeing the difference in the books, Tsai felt the country’s pursuit was too narrow.
“What’s the use of a better economy if there is such a big cultural gap between Taiwan and its neighbor. It was really humiliating,” he said, adding that he then made a vow to one day publish his own pictorial almanac of butterflies endemic to Taiwan to bring the beauty of the “butterfly kingdom” to local residents.
When he finally returned to his home in industrial Kaohsiung City six months later, he knew he could no longer continue the family business — a company that sold cooking oil.
“My mind was set. I wanted to be a butterfly chaser,” Tsai said.
Of Taiwan’s 400 butterfly species, Tsai has recorded 345, but tracking down so many butterflies has not been easy and has led him on plenty of adventures around Taiwan.
In his more “crazy” days, whenever he heard about the appearance of rare butterflies, he would easily cover more than 500km a day on his motorcycle to see them.
Starting out in Kaohsiung, he would ride the Central Cross-Island Highway to Hualien and head south along the east coast to Taitung and Pingtung before returning to Kaohsiung.
Several times, he was so mesmerized by butterflies that he forgot he was driving on a treacherous mountain road and wound up crashing into roadside ditches. One day, while in hot pursuit of an elusive beauty, he crashed his motorcycle into the side of a mountain.
“That was actually fortunate,” he said, “because if it had been on the other side of the road, I would have fallen off a cliff.”
This blind pursuit of butterflies has become his guiding philosophy — “using the dumb way to get the best picture.”
Butterflies like to loiter by riversides, but Tsai believes photographing them from above does not make a good picture, so he gets into position by wading into rivers, braving rapid currents, slippery rocks and, in early spring when some species appear, frigid water.
When a butterfly is perched high on a tree, he often climbs another tree to shoot it from a different angle. If the subject is frightened away, Tsai simply stays in the tree, and waits for it to return.
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