It must have been destiny. Back in the 1980s when Chen Chin-fa was in advertising, a client asked him to go sailing before taking on his yachting account. Afraid of water, Chen was reluctant to do so but the thought of losing the client compelled him to go out in a little rubber dinghy. His worst fears materialized when a big wave capsized the boat, leaving Chen struggling in the water. "It was horrifying!" he says. "I thought I was a goner." Semi-conscious, he felt himself dragged by the shoulders to shore. Chen was saved, but to this day the 45-year-old documentary maker still does not know who his savior was. "I thought Heaven spared me because I had something significant to do in my life," Chen says. "So I started to consider a career change."
Destiny and Danger
An applied fine arts major, Chen soon quit advertising and decided to dedicate himself to raising environmental awareness on the island by making documentaries. "It happened when I sat by a creek in my hometown, Pinglin in Taipei County, and found it was much less clean than when I was small," says Chen. "At that moment I knew I was meant to record the images and sounds of the natural environment to show the public the importance of protecting it." Chen has been behind the camera for the 18 years since, pursuing his calling.
The early years of Chen's documentary career were spent working on a wide range of environmental topics with the Broadcasting Development Fund. He has also worked for government agencies like Shei Pa National Park, doing films on endangered species such as landlocked salmon. All of these documentaries were contracted by the various agencies, and it is unlikely they were profitable. "You spend much more time than you expect filming a documentary of this kind because of the many things that slow you down, such as weather conditions and the unpredictability of nature," he explains.
Working in the wilderness can be life-threatening too, which worries Chen's family. "My wife hopes I'll think twice about my chosen path whenever she sees me coming home with cuts and bruises," Chen says, and there are times when the documentary director himself reconsiders his course. During a shoot for a film on landlocked salmon, Chen fell from a high cliff in wet weather. Grasping the sharp wild grass below to stop himself falling further, he lacerated his hands and arms badly. However, he and his wife never complain about his work too seriously. "Every time my wife sees the beauty of the nature in my documentaries, she is thrilled and encourages me anew," he says.
Endangered Species
Chen's wildlife documentaries have not gone unnoticed. In April this year he won the Platinum Remi Award at the 40th WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival for his 24-minute documentary on the Guanwu salamander, which was three years in the making. Founded in 1961, the festival grants awards to the best films in a wide range of genres, chosen from 4,300 candidates from 37 countries this year.
Chen initially hesitated over the film on the species, commissioned by Shei Pa National Park, because he knew so little about it. He had heard of the species for the first time while making a documentary on an endangered butterfly in the region, but had never seen one, and information on the salamander was rather scarce. "But I thought if I could track the life of a wandering butterfly, I could follow a species that crawls on the ground," he says. Thus, he started filming In Search of Relic Species from the Jurassic Period.
The salamander was first spotted in the mid-1990s at an altitude of 2,000 meters in Guanwu, a mountainous region in central Taiwan, by a student from the Department of Life Science of National Taiwan Normal University. A research team led by his teacher Lue Kuang-yang started follow-up investigation of the life cycle of the species in 1996. From Lue's experience, the species, a living fossil at home in the rocky crevices near mountain streams, is hard to find. "My students and I would spend a week in the wilderness and find only one salamander," he says.
Chen was not much luckier: after three years in the mountains, he only got to see about 50 of the Guanwu salamander, and this was the result of hard work and patience. The director first had to consult with experts like Lue and study as much information as possible before spending months tracking down and watching the slow-moving creature. He had to spend many nights in the species' habitat in order to understand its nocturnal life. "What I was afraid of by myself in the forest at night was an encounter with a bear," Chen says. "And the minute it started to rain, I'd have to leave to avoid flash floods." Only after letting the salamanders get used to his presence and scoping out their world on all fours could Chen begin to think about lugging his 40-kilogram camera on foot along mountain trails to shoot the film.
But the physical arduousness of shooting the film was nothing compared with what natural disasters brought. Torrential rain caused mudslides several times in Guanwu during the three years, killing more than 10 people and destroying habitats of the salamanders in the region. "Rocks fell, trees were swept away, and the stream dried up. And the salamanders, which thrive in shady, cool wet places, disappeared," Chen says. "So I often prayed, hoping that there'd be something left to film."
When the director finished shooting, only two out of six spots at which he observed and recorded the life of the amphibian were still intact, which makes his documentary all the poignant. "Soon we probably won't find any," Chen says. In response to the clear threat to the species' survival, the Forestry Bureau of the Council of Agriculture is planning to recover and preserve the species' habitats, while the national park is educating the public about the salamander through means such as Chen's film.
Beauty, Not Science
Through the documentary, the director hopes the public pays more attention to the species and the threats it faces. To achieve this goal, he emphasizes the documentary's aesthetic aspect rather than scientific explanations. "Chen's film is touching because it is beautiful, it's pleasant to watch," says Lin Ching, director of Shei Pa National Park Headquarters. "That's important, because only when you feel touched by the beauty of nature are you moved to protect the environment."
Indeed, the film focuses on the sounds and images of life in the wild, rather than dense scientific jargon. "Even a shot of a falling maple leaf without narration can be rich in meaning," he says. "I was asked to absorb a lot of information when I was in school, but I failed to remember any in the end. So I only explain some simple biological concepts in my film."
Chen has already shot footage of more than 70 species in Taiwan, most of which is unedited and produced for his own collection. Meanwhile, he has been taking complete films around the island and showing them in schools to enhance environmental awareness among the young. "Initially I contacted schools and asked whether they were interested, but now I've started to receive invitations from them," he says.
As environmental awareness grows, Chen hopes that, in the long term, he can build an information center where all the films and books on Taiwan's ecology can be found. While this may seem a remote goal, Chen remains optimistic. "If you want to see any achievement in whatever job you do, perseverance is the key factor," he says.
And perseverance is indeed crucial to Chen's work. Five years ago in Penghu, an archipelago in the Taiwan Strait, while making a documentary on the endangered green turtle, Chen and his assistant finally caught turtles laying eggs on film. Silently committing the turtles to celluloid, he was startled by a strange noise. "I had no idea what it was at first, then I realized it was my assistant, a young man, moved to tears by the scene," he says. "Our hard work had finally paid off."
Formosan Salamander
There are five known species of salamander endemic to Taiwan, all coming under the genus Hynobius. Commonly known in English as Formosan salamander, the species is called wild pepper fish in Chinese. They are so called because they secrete a pungent liquid, smelling like wild pepper, as a defensive weapon against their predators, says Lue Kuang-yang, a researcher of Formosan salamanders.
Three of the five species were discovered during the colonial era (1895-1945) by the Japanese, who first officially recorded them as amphibians in 1915. The remaining two species, found by Lue and his students at Guanwu in Shei Pa National Park and at Nanhu Mountain in Taroko National Park, will soon be formally recognized when an article on them is published in Herpetologica, an English-language academic journal on herpetology, later this year.
"It has taken a long time to formally introduce these two new species to the world, mainly because their population is so small," says Lue, co-author of the article. "Only when you get enough samples sharing the same characteristics can you verify the discovery of a new species."
In fact, Taiwanese scientists have been lucky to find the Formosan salamander, a living fossil whose related species have already become extinct. According to Lue, salamanders of this genus, thriving only in temperate climes, once existed all over the island during the last ice age about 11,000 years ago. When the ice melted away, the species survived by moving to higher altitudes with cooler temperatures. To date, no salamanders of this genus have been found at lower latitudes than those of Taiwan. Although the island is subtropical, the lofty mountain ranges of Taiwan provide the species with a suitably cool environment.
The phenomenon of global warming certainly poses a threat to the survival of the Formosan salamander, but Lue points out that climatic change also has a worrying human side. "The public is learning more and more about them through the media, which means the species are more and more vulnerable to poaching," he says. "I've already seen endangered frogs being traded as pets on the Internet."
While the discovery of new species is challenging enough, protecting them is perhaps even more so.
Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw