Retelling the tale, Tsai said this was just one of many such accidents resulting from his lifelong love affair with butterflies, and, although he had suffered cuts and bruises, the wall had prevented him from driving his bike over a cliff.
Tsai spent much of the last 30 years making a photographic record of Taiwan's butterflies, and his collection now totals 380 species. Recently, 60 of Tsai's photos were selected for an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. starting May 10, which will attempt to educate visitors about butterflies' lifecycles and raise awareness of the need for protection of the insects' natural habitats.
Tsai grew up in Kaohsiung City, where butterflies flitting around the garden were a common sight. The arrival of chemical factories and other giant plants as the city's economy boomed meant that the butterflies gradually disappeared, however. Tsai said he almost forgot about the existence of the beautiful, enchanting creatures until, years later, he visited his friend Chang Ching-po, who had opened a hotel in the Hualien area of eastern Taiwan. There, among green hills and under unpolluted skies, Chang lived an enviable life, catering to the needs of his predominantly Japanese tourists. He built a stage for local aborigines to perform their brilliant dances and, around the stage, planted flowers and herbs popular with butterflies so that they, too, would be attracted to perform their own kind of dance.
"The customers liked the butterflies," Tsai said, adding that "Japanese probably care more about insects than anyone else in the world." During his time in Hualien, Tsai met many Japanese tourists visiting the region's butterfly-rich valleys, including researchers touring the island in search of rare species in their natural environments. Some offered large sums of money to purchase specimens, however, which could further threaten them with extinction.
Tsai likened this to a "cultural invasion" and said he and his friends were engaging in "ecological competition" with the tourists. Part of this involved the completion of systematic classification of the island's butterfly species--which, ironically, had been started during the 50-year Japanese colonial period but left incomplete--and part required a thorough investigation of the insects' lifecycles and habitats; hence Tsai's photography.
Having graduated from a vocational high school in Kaohsiung, Tsai did not receive any professional photography training, he admitted. He said he was good at painting in school, however. One junior-high-school teacher even liked his work so much that, having given him top marks, he added Tsai's drawings to his own collection. Tsai's interest in photography originated from that in painting, he said, but he was also inspired by the composition of photos in newspapers and the color shots used in the magazines he bought from secondhand stalls. He particularly remembered one photo in Life magazine: "I looked at the picture of a spider's web sprinkled with crystal-like drops of water and was fascinated. A wish immediately grew in my heart--one day I would take a photo like that."
It was in his attempt to realize this dream, Tsai said, that he traveled the length and breadth of Taiwan, although this did not include the outlying islands of Kinmen and Matzu, since the butterfly species there were continental and not really "Taiwanese." That still left him around 380 to choose from, a lifetime's task. "I travel around tracking their distribution and recording their lifecycles," Tsai explained. "All of this requires field research, which can take six months or even up to one year. Only by living in one place for long enough can you hope to find rare butterflies, so it is hard for me to say where exactly my home is." Many parts of Taiwan had large numbers of butterflies, he noted. The more butterflies a place had, the better it tended to be for human habitation, he said, adding "See if you can find any butterflies in the desert."
Even when he had tracked down a particular species, studying its lifecycle and taking good pictures was not a foregone conclusion. Tsai illustrated this by means of the purple crow butterflies, which can be seen flying south to overwinter in the Maolin National Scenic Area, where between 200,000 and 1 million gather along the river in one valley each year.
"Despite this large number, they are wary of people and won't let you get close," Tsai said. The key to photographing them, he explained, was to establish a relationship of trust, to try to understand what they were thinking and not to agitate them. He therefore learned to adjust his behavior according to the movement of the butterflies.
Things were still not straightforward. "When a butterfly sips nectar from a flower, it moves from side to side. If I have to move forward, I will get an inclined angle, which is no good for microphotography because the picture will be clear in the middle and blurred at the sides," Tsai said. He often ended up dancing around far more than the butterflies themselves and sometimes had to immerse himself in the river to get the right angle for his shots.
Over the years, Tsai learned many tricks for attracting butterflies, of course. One was to carry a colorful cloth with him, which he spreads on the ground to imitate flowers. Butterflies relying on their vision fall for that, he explained. Pulling grains of salt from his pocket, he said that other butterflies would come to salty substances like people's bodies or shoes because butterflies were water-cooled, which meant they lost salt easily. Some photographers even used their own urine. "As urine ferments," he stated, "it generates a saline solution."
Now that he carries a pocketful of salt or even a flask of urine, butterflies come to Tsai, and he no longer has to risk crashing into walls or riding off cliffs to get his trademark shots.
Write to Sandra Shih at sandrashih@mail.gio.gov.tw