Following the success of its “Forest of Food” calendar last year, the Forestry Bureau scored another hit this year with a calendar featuring Taiwanese satoyama animals.
The calendar’s first printing of 3,000 copies sold out in two days, and its second printing of 5,000 copies sold out within a week, the bureau said, adding that it would not print any more copies.
Satoyama refers to a low-altitude region between mountains and flatlands, Forestry Bureau Director-General Lin Hwa-ching (林華慶) said.
Photo courtesy of the Forestry Bureau
It is the center of human activity and populated by common animals such as cicadas, moths, dragonflies, mitten crabs, frogs and snails, he said.
However, economic exploitation and environmental changes have caused some animals to quietly disappear, he said.
The bureau therefore chose to highlight satoyama animals in this year’s calendar to promote the concept of positive coexistence between humans and satoyama animals, he said.
Each page features lively illustrations of different animal species, Lin said, adding that he did not want the drawings to look like scientific illustrations, because that would have created a distance between the viewer and the images.
Although he is a snake expert, the calendar did not include any snakes, because they are considered taboo and some people are scared of seeing them, Lin said.
After the release of the calendar’s first edition, someone pointed out that the male Swinhoe’s pheasant was missing spurs on its legs and that the snail’s shell spiraled counterclockwise instead of clockwise, he said.
These mistakes were corrected in the second printing, he said.
The bureau was glad that the calendar elicited such a passionate response, he said, adding that conservation should be part of everyone’s lives.
In February last year, the bureau also worked with the Taiwan Railways Administration to paint images of eight species on its trains.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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