Thanks to the application of an infrared surveillance camcorder with thermal sensors, the Forestry Bureau yesterday said it has recorded a number of rare images of protected wild animals, including clear footage of the endangered Formosan black bear, in the forests near Taitung County’s Luye (鹿野) and Guanshan (關山) townships.
The bureau said it began installing infrared cameras in national forests nationwide in the 1980s to gather information on the wildlife in protected areas. However, the cameras had mechanical limits and gathering long-term images of wild animals was difficult.
Two years ago, the bureau installed 12 infrared camcorders in mountainous areas in the hope of gathering more information about the behavior of wild animals. The camcorders were fitted with thermal sensors that cause the cameras to shoot footage automatically for periods of 10 seconds when triggered.
Photo: CNA, courtesy of the Taitung Forest District Office
“The camcorders use thermal sensors that automatically start recording when they sense heat within five meters,” said Lo Shuang-hsi (羅雙喜), an executive at the bureau’s Taitung Forest District Office. “We did have infrared cameras in the past, but they could not capture motion like the new ones.”
“In addition, the batteries in the old cameras did not last that long, so we had to go check on them very often,” he said. “They also needed film, so sometimes when we checked on the cameras, they had already run out of film, or their batteries had died before they ran out of film.”
Catching an image of a Formosan black bear walking past the camcorder for the first time in two years, the district office’s recreational section chief Huang Chium-tse (黃群策) said the bear was pictured at an altitude of about 850m, the lowest altitude at which a Formosan black bear has ever been sighted.
With a white “V” on its chest, a sturdy black body, round head, short neck and long snout, the Formosan black bear — the only native bear species in Taiwan — was listed as an endangered species by the Wildlife Conservation Act (野生動物保育法) in 1989.
Taiwan Black Bear Conservation chairperson Hwang Mei-hsiu (黃美秀) said the Formosan black bear is a very sensitive animal, often inhabiting deep -mountainous areas, adding that there are probably less than 1,000 bears left in Taiwan.
Aside from the bear, other rare wild animals were also recorded, including the Formosan serow, the Formosan sambar, the Formosan barking deer, the Formosan yellow-throated marten and the Swinhoe’s pheasant, the bureau said.
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