A young woman who used to be a biology teacher at a junior high school in Taitung, has lived for the last three years in the deep forests of Jade Mountain, the highest mountain in Taiwan, where she leads a nomadic life tracking the area's endangered Formosa black bears.
Huang Mei-hsiou (
Jade Mountain is part of the north-south running Central Mountain Range, which is known as the spine of Taiwan, but the black bears have been so rarely seen over the past few decades that at one point there was speculation that the animals were on the verge of extinction.
Huang's interest was piqued by the speculation when she was studying for a master's degree at National Taiwan University's Animal Research Institute after quitting her teaching career. After receiving her master's degree, she headed to the University of Minnesota to undertake advanced studies on Asiatic bears in general and the Formosa black bear in particular.
More than four years ago, Huang returned to Taiwan armed with the results of her studies and went directly to Jade Mountain to become a full time bear-watcher and researcher.
During the three years that she has stayed in Jade Mountain on and off, Huang said she was technically a nomad, following the movements of the bears.
Bear watching is not fun and most of the time not rewarding at all, she said. "Sometimes you don't see anything for days, not even a lump of bear dung," she added.
In icy cold weather or during the pitch-dark nights, it can be very scary, she recalled. Carrying nearly 30km on their backs, Huang and her co-researchers usually need to walk for three to four days before reaching their observation stops.
"During the grueling climbs and hikes, the risk of snake bite and falling rocks are only small parts of the challenges," she continued.
Huang is not the first zoologist to research the Formosa black bear, but she was lucky enough to obtain financial assistance from the Jade Mountain National Park Administration to study the animal with superior resources, including helicopters to track the bears and animal collars installed with global positioning system devices.
Although Huang and her group have successfully captured alive 15 bears, she declined to speculate as to how many bears are living in the deep mountains.
"Figures can be misleading and could lead people to misunderstand the bears' situation. Figures could also provide hunters with an excuse to kill the animals," she said.
Although the aboriginal people are highly environmentally conscious and don't kill to harm the natural eco-system, the aborigines do hunt bears sometimes, attracted by the high profits, according to Huang.
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