Taiwan Today

In 2000, the Formosan black bear was voted the favorite Taiwanese wild animal by visitors to the Taipei Zoo. The next year, it was adopted as the mascot for an international baseball contest in Taiwan. While Taiwanese people are baseball enthusiasts and are up on all the big-name players, they know little about their own star animal. There have been few reported sightings of Formosan bears in recent years, and even field researchers find little trace of their subjects in the wild.

A subspecies of the Asiatic black bear, the Formosan variety is the only bear native to Taiwan and is its largest carnivore. The stocky caniforms are 1.2 to 1.9 meters tall, weigh 50 to 200 kilograms and have long, thick brownish-black fur. They are known as moon bears to Taiwan's aborigines, for the white V-shaped mark on their chests, and are believed to have broadly inhabited Taiwan's forests at all elevations.

Increasing human exploitation of the natural environment over the last few centuries has left the bears facing a threat to their survival. In 1989 they were listed as an endangered species and granted full protection by the Wildlife Conservation Act. Asiatic black bears are listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) as a vulnerable species and are also protected from trade in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

No reliable population estimate of the Formosan black bear exists. Hwang Mei-hsiu, assistant professor at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology's Institute of Wildlife Conservation, points out that Taiwan's lush forests, which cover more than half of the 36,000-square-kilometer island, can accommodate approximately 3,000 to 4,000 bears. "As a country famous for its industrial and technological achievements," Hwang says, "Taiwan often surprises foreigners with satellite images of forested landscapes." She estimates that, for a larger carnivore like black bears, a population of 2,000 to 3,000 would ensure the animal's survival. "500 is the minimum number required to escape gradual extinction," she says. "I can't tell you the exact number of living Formosan black bears, but I can tell you that I've found little evidence of their presence, such as excreta and claw marks on tree trunks, during my field trips to forested mountains."

Poaching Still a Problem

Co-chair of the IUCN's Asiatic Black Bear Expert Team, 37-year-old Hwang is one of the few people researching Formosan black bears. From 1998 to 2000, as a doctoral student of conservation biology in the University of Minnesota in the United States, she was leader of the first major field research project on the indigenous bears funded by Yushan National Park Headquarters in central Taiwan's mountainous region. Assisted by members of the Bunun tribe, Hwang's team captured and anaesthetized 15 bears and fitted them with radio collars for long-term tracking. Eight of them had missing toes or paws. "They were the ones that had managed to break out of the traps set up by hunters," she says. "This figure doesn't include those that didn't make it." This suggests that, although the bears are protected by law, poaching poses a continuing threat to their number.

Hwang thinks that aboriginal hunters are not solely to blame. For Bunun people who live among central Taiwan's high mountains, killing bears is inauspicious because they are omnivorous, stand on the five-toe feet of their hind legs to reach for food or fight and usually give birth to one or two babies. This gives them an almost human aura, and they have a legendary connection to the aborigines' ancestors. Despite the taboo, killing a bear is considered a heroic event on account of its rarity and great difficulty--which explains why bears were never the usual prey of local hunters--and became a focus of traditional hunting rites, in which the slaughtered bears were shared with members of the tribe in ceremonial feasts.

Imbued with social and cultural significance, the ritual of bear hunting is very different from the Han's commercial exploitation of the animal. A Chinese idiom states that one must choose between "fish" and "bear paws," two valuable items that cannot be possessed at one time. In Han culture, all major bear parts such as the gall bladder, meat and paws have been highly valued for their medicinal properties or as bush meat delicacies. "Indigenous peoples' increasing interaction with the Han altered their hunting culture," says Wang Ying, professor at National Taiwan Normal University's Department of Life Science and one of the pioneers in a study of caged and wild Formosan black bears in the early 1990s. Hwang Mei-hsiu says that economic pressure could force some to break the law. "If your kids had no money to pay for their lunch at school," Hwang says, "then you might choose to hunt the highly valued bears and sell them on the black market, which is largely beyond the government's control."

Habitat Under Threat

Wang believes that it is hard to determine the precise extent of human intervention in the serious threat to the species. More often than not, for example, bears are caught in traps placed for other game. While the government banned logging in all natural forests in 1992, the construction of roads through primary forests poses a major threat to the bear's habitat by limiting their feeding territory of 30 to 40 kilometers. "Roads bring households with guard dogs," Wang says. "Bears won't cross roads if there are dogs on the other side." Roads also make forested regions more accessible to human activities--like illegal hunting--that adversely affect bears' survival.

Hwang points out that, fortunately, Taiwan's unstable geological formations and rugged topography provide wild animals with a reasonable chance to find undisturbed shelter. Recent surveys found evidence of a greater presence of black bears in regions over 2,000 meters above sea level in protected areas such as Yushan National Park, other national parks and nature reserves. This is the result of bears moving to a habitat with less human activity and more food sources. Although they are omnivores, Formosan black bears live on a chiefly vegetarian diet including nuts, seeds and fruits, quite contrary to this robust species' ferocious, and by implication carnivorous, image.

The increasingly remote bear habitats, with their rough terrain, dense vegetation and rarity of trails, have caused great difficulty for field researchers like Hwang. With an annual budget of less than NT$1 million, or US$30,000, Hwang usually cannot afford to use helicopters to fly her team into remote areas or employ local porters to carry the team's heavy equipment. "Weighed down with 20 to 30 kilograms each, we sometimes spend five days just walking to and from the research sites," says Hwang. "This kind of working environment is hardly encouraging for students or their parents." Indeed, she almost fell into a ravine some years ago. Apart from the danger of personal injury, the rarity of sighting bears means researchers have few raw data from which to write papers, and so face a dim academic future.

Hwang believes that ursine study is more engaging and worthwhile than the desultory government grants for her research suggests. "Studies of insects like ants, cockroaches or grasshoppers are of course valuable in their own way," she says, "but people tend to show a stronger emotional bond toward a big, furry mammal." More significantly, standing at the top of the food chain in their far ranging habitat, the omnivorous black bears live in forests as an umbrella species. That is to say, their health and living conditions are a crucial environmental indicator of natural habitats, according to Yang Chieh-chung, chief secretary of the government's Endemic Species Research Institute. "If bears can be protected," Yang says, "then all other species, both fauna and flora, will receive adequate protection."

Conservation Awareness

Yang thinks that Formosan black bears could play a leading role in promoting conservation awareness among Taiwanese people, attracting attention to similar efforts for other species at the same time. His institute in central Nantou County has just completed a stage of a natural habitat re-entry program for two cubs born in captivity. The program aims to equip animals with the skills to re-enter their natural habitats while tracking them and helping out if problems occur. Yang advocates setting up a nature park where visitors could see bears in a relatively undisturbed environment. "People tend to be fascinated with cute baby bears but fear them when they grow up," he says. "A more natural interaction between humans and bears would contribute a lot to educational programs on conservation."

The eight Formosan black bears kept at Yang's institute and several others in zoos and at Hwang's school enable researchers to collect fundamental behavioral data in a convenient and controlled environment, where bears do not have to be anaesthetized as in field study. "This avoids any possible physical harm," says Yang Jian-ren, deputy director of Taipei Zoo. "Instead of drawing blood, we collect the bears' excreta for biological investigation." Among other things, the stable data bank in the zoo could help determine Formosan black bears' genetic relations with other subspecies of the Asiatic black bear. The zoo has formed a research group tasked with preserving the unique indigenous species. "Wild animals are national treasures," Yang says. "Bears have aesthetic, educational, recreational, medical, scientific and ecological value for all of us."

On a fundamental level, the survival of Formosan black bears in the wild stands for Taiwan's integrity of its natural environment. "In contrast to popular imported animals such as penguins or koalas, black bears are an example of a uniquely native experience," Hwang says. Wang Ying thinks that children should not be taught the ferocious stereotype of bears but rather their role as guardian god of the mountains and forests, so they can learn the Bunun legends that bestow humans and black bears with a common ancestry.

Write to Pat Gao at pat@mail.gio.gov.tw