The long-term movements of a Formosan black bear were revealed for the first time on Monday, marking what officials said was an “important milestone” in the conservation of the threatened species.
The results of the rehabilitation and tracking effort were detailed at a Forestry Bureau event in Taitung County, which also premiered a short film, titled Mulas, Kulumaha (返抵山林), to document the story.
In July 2019, a Formosan black bear cub was discovered by residents of Taitung County’s Guangyuan Village (廣原).
Photo courtesy of the Forestry Bureau
In honor of the village leader’s name and the cub’s perseverance, the locals named the cub “Mulas” after the Bunun word for “wild strawberry.”
Only a few months old when found, Mulas was given to the Taitung Forest District Office, which raised the cub for 10 months.
Before releasing her back into the wild in May last year, Mulas was fitted with a GPS tracking collar capable of remote release.
The 405 days of data collected before the collar was removed in June are the first time a Formosan black bear’s activity in the wild has been tracked over an extended period, bureau Director-General Lin Hwa-ching (林華慶) said.
Mulas covered more than 314km, climbing daily the equivalent of 100 flights of stairs in a vertical range of more than 120km, said Formosan Wild Sound Conservation Science Center founder Chiang Po-jen (姜博仁), who followed the signals.
As Mulas was at first unfamiliar with her surroundings, early data do not show a direction or pattern to her movements, Chiang said.
By wintertime, she settled on a warm south-facing cliff with easy access to water, he said.
The data showed that Mulas, like all black bears, grew more active in the fall to prepare for winter, he said.
By late June, after she had settled into a pattern, her collar was released and a team was sent to retrieve it, about 3km from where she had been released more than a year earlier, Chiang said.
A short video of the collar retrieval and a longer documentary about Mulas were also screened at the event, “hopefully contributing to the understanding of Formosan black bear conservation work,” office Director Wu Chang-yu (吳昌祐) said.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS