In April, the low-elevation mountain forests of Taitung County are burgeoning with new green growth, and are alive with birdsong. These past few years, for the "Wild Boar Man"--a famous Han Chinese hunter from Taimali in Taitung--the first important task each spring has been to lead a group of friends up the mountains in search of mountain hawk-eagle nests. Just as in his hunting days, they scramble up slopes and over ridges, but whereas in the past he was looking for game to sell at a high price, now his aim is to do "something worthwhile."

The Wild Boar Man's real name is Chen Hsu-huang. He talks frankly and spiritedly about how he came to form a partnership with nature filmmaker Liu Yen-ming to film mountain hawk-eagles. Years ago, whenever the breeding season arrived in his boar hunting grounds, there would be a family of hawk-eagles on almost every mountaintop. But a decade or so ago he realized that the eagles were growing ever scarcer. "A hunter naturally notices if the amount of game goes down," he says. He couldn't just sit idly by and watch such a magnificent bird disappear. Prodded by a sense of guilt and crisis, he sought out Liu Yen-ming in the hope that Liu could record some last images of the hawk-eagles.

Liu Yen-ming, who has always liked filming birds, accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. He unexpectedly obtained sponsorship from the hotel and resort group Leofoo, and so in return he was able to "employ" the Wild Boar Man as a guide. Despite a dearth of academic research on the mountain hawk-eagle, the two men boldly embarked on a filming program that people in ornithological circles freely acknowledge was of the highest order of difficulty.

The unlikely partnership between Taitung hunter Chen Hsu-huang (left) and Taipei filmmaker Liu Yen-ming (right) came about on account of the mountain hawk-eagle. For over five years they have been going deep into the mountains and overcoming many dangers to record a moving story of the forest.

Worth a motorcycle

The mountain hawk-eagle, also known as Hodgson's hawk-eagle (scientific name Spizaetus nipalensis), is Taiwan's largest resident bird of prey, and is mainly active in medium- to low-elevation primeval forest. It is at the top of the forest food chain, and preys not only on muntjac, macaque and squirrel, but also on many medium and even large-sized bird species. The mountain hawk-eagle stands some 76 centimeters tall, and its wingspan may exceed 160 centimeters. Its plumage has brown stripes somewhat like a tiger's. Its bearing is martial and upright, and a backward-sloping crest gives its head a handsome outline. The bird's majestic appearance sets it apart from other raptors such as the Indian black eagle or crested serpent eagle, but is also what makes it so attractive to hunters and to people who keep eagles in captivity.

"For the price of a baby hawk-eagle, you can buy a motorbike and have money to spare!" The Wild Boar Man, whose hunting skills outclass even many Aborigines, says the profit to be earned from mountain hawk-eagles is high, but it takes a hunter worth his salt to track one down. In his youth he perfected the skill of locating hawk-eagle nests. "When you see an eagle in the distance flying from one mountaintop to another carrying prey in its beak, you have to get a fix on the precise spot where it has its nest. Then you go to that part of the mountain to look for it." You also have to understand the hawk-eagle's nest-building habits, if your search is not to be in vain. Mountain hawk-eagles mostly build their nests on three kinds of tree: Michelia compressa, large-leaved nanmu (Machilus japonica var. kusanoi) and stout camphor (Cinnamomum kanehirae), which are dominant species at medium to low elevations. The tree must be big enough to support the eagles' weight, and nest has to be positioned where it is easy for the adult birds to enter and leave, and where there are air currents, so that the birds can carry prey back to the nest to feed their young.

To locate a mountain hawk-eagle nest usually took the Wild Boar Man several days. "When I would finally climb the big tree and take the eaglet, I would put it in my shirt pocket and head off down the mountain, whistling as I went," he recounts with satisfaction.

It was on the strength of his understanding of the mountain hawk-eagle's habits that in the winter of 1998 the Wild Boar Man persuaded Liu Yen-ming to film the eagles. So began a five-year journey of discovery into the birds' remarkable world.

In the spring of 1999, the Wild Boar Man found a hawk-eagle nest on a large-leaved nanmu close to the upper reaches of the Taimali Creek. The nest was some 20-25 meters above the ground. Mountain hawk-eagles raise only one brood a year, and lay only one egg per brood, and the eaglet stays in the nest for 75-80 days after it hatches. If during this time the eagles suffer attack by natural enemies, habitat destruction, or human disturbance, the breeding season may to come to nothing.

To protect himself from the eagles, the Wild Boar Man donned a steel helmet of his own manufacture, and looking like a Ninja Turtle, cautiously built a platform in another tree 30 meters away, at the same height as the nest. Liu Yen-ming, who in his cinematographic career has filmed over 200 different bird species, was confident that in this way he would be able to film the eaglet growing up in the nest. But to his surprise, "After the adult birds had fed the eaglet they noticed us, and they simply would not come back to the nest."

The majestic mountain hawk-eagle is Taiwan's largest resident raptor. A pair of eagles raises only one eaglet a year, so the pressures of hunting and habitat loss can severely impact their breeding success.

The longest week

"At that time very little research had been done into mountain hawk-eagles in Taiwan, so we were utterly groping in the dark as we built up experience." Liu recalls that when in late April 2001 they found an hawk-eagle nest on a Michelia compressa in the same area, they decided that Liu would take the risk of spending the nights in the tree, to avoid alarming the birds by climbing up and down, and perhaps causing them to abandon the nest.

Thanks to their previous experience of building a platform in a tree, the one they built this time was more solid than the first, and much better camouflaged. So as not to disturb the eagles, they also decided to bring in supplies at night. "The first year we had failed, so this year we couldn't afford to fail again!" Liu Yen-ming says that this put a great deal of pressure on the Wild Boar Man, who was responsible for bringing in supplies, because in addition to the dangers of driving on winding mountain tracks at night, he had to scale two sheer precipices to get to the filming site.

"We both took out high levels of insurance, and we agreed that if either of us fell the other should not try to save him," says Liu with a wry smile. Communications were also a big problem. Every morning and evening the Wild Boar Man had to drive to a certain unobstructed mountaintop to speak with Liu by radio, in order to find out what the birds were doing, whether Liu was okay, and when he needed more supplies.

Despite their caution, their fears came true. They had probably alarmed the parent birds when building the hide, for when Liu began filming, although the adult birds brought back prey to the nest each day, they immediately flew away. The little eaglet could just about cope with small rodents on its own, but if the prey was a red-bellied tree squirrel or a large bird, it could only call forlornly into the air, yet its highly cautious mother would not come back to feed it. This put Liu Yen-ming on the horns of a dilemma, and the Wild Boar Man even took the risk of climbing to the nest and feeding finely chopped chicken meat to the eaglet.

"We really struggled over whether we should pull out," they recall. If the adult birds did not come back, the eaglet could not survive, and they would have been its killers. But if they pulled out, that year's work would all have come to nothing. In the end they decided to wait another two days. Perhaps their sincerity moved heaven, for on the seventh day a thick fog hid their treehouse from the adult eagles' view, and they finally came back to feed their young. "I can't begin to describe how pleased we were!" says Liu.

In his days as a hunter the Wild Boar Man, who never used traps, kept over 30 hunting dogs. Since his "conversion" to conservation work he now has just one black dog as a companion. During the filming work the Wild Boar Man suffered a stroke, but with the help of rehabilitation therapy has fortunately made a good recovery.

Another bird

After the fog cleared, the eagles seemed to have grown accustomed to the presence of the hide, and they began to come back and feed the eaglet every day. Liu Yen-ming's life in the treehouse also took up a fixed rhythm. The hide was over 20 meters high up in a large-leaved nanmu tree; it had a floor space of less than three-and-a-half square meters and was only tall enough to crouch or sit in. For fear of scaring the eagles, Liu did not set foot outside the hide, so eating, drinking and going to the toilet all had to be done in situ.

Recalling his life in the treehouse, Liu says he got up every day at dawn, and after a simple brush-up and a few biscuits by way of breakfast, he began to set up his equipment and get to work. The mother and father bird would come back to the nest with some prey to feed their young between about seven and nine o'clock. They would also return once in the afternoon with some more prey. Liu Yen-ming estimates that around 70% of the prey was red-bellied squirrel, followed by birds, Formosan giant flying squirrel, and so on.

Because the male and female birds returned to the nest at irregular times, Liu had to keep watch at all times, and keep his ears open too. His midday meal consisted of more biscuits plus instant sweet white instant. It was not until dusk that he would cook a little hot food, and any fresh vegetables that the Wild Boar Man occasionally brought in were a real luxury. At night, to save his batteries, he usually went to bed as soon as he had finished eating. As for going to the toilet, he would defecate onto newspaper, wrap it up and throw it as far away from the tree as possible, and he would urinate into plastic bottles. He also had to endure going more than three weeks without washing, so that he began to smell little different from the wild animals in the forest.

Staying on his own deep in the mountains, apart from the loneliness there were many other unexpected occurrences. In 2001, not long after Liu Yen-ming took up residence in the treehouse, a swarm of black ants arrived and scurried everywhere. He had to wrap up all his food tightly, and do his best to coexist with them peacefully. Another night he felt something crawling past his body. After trying several times to shoo it away, he turned on the light to discover a 25-centimeter-long centipede. But fortunately Liu, who is used to the outdoor life, was not fazed by these incidents.

The unlikely partnership between Taitung hunter Chen Hsu-huang (left) and Taipei filmmaker Liu Yen-ming (right) came about on account of the mountain hawk-eagle. For over five years they have been going deep into the mountains and overcoming many dangers to record a moving story of the forest.

Tender raptors

Although life in the hide was tough, it enabled him to observe the eagles at close quarters. A scene he found particularly moving was the way the mother bird would carefully rip apart a piece of prey and spend one to two hours patiently putting strip after strip of meat into the eaglet's beak, and the way the eaglet responded with satisfied calls. "Who'd have thought such a fierce raptor would have had such a tender side?" He also never tired of seeing the cute way the eaglet would fall over in the nest when it tried to use its weak young claws to tear apart scraps of meat left by its mother.

Through long observation, the birds' habits gradually became clearer. For instance, whenever Liu saw the eaglet facing in a particular direction and chirruping, then prostrating itself in the nest, he knew the mother bird was about to return to feed it. Japanese research suggests that this "telepathic" response between mother and child is in fact a submissive behavior. Every day the mother eagle was sure to clean away any leftover prey, to prevent the meat going bad in the nest. But whenever the male bird returned with prey it would drop it into the nest and aloofly fly away.

After three weeks of filming, they predicted that the lifestyle of the eaglet was unlikely to change much, so Liu left the hide for a while to film the activities of the hawk-eagles in the nearby mountains. But on returning a week later they discovered that the eaglet had fallen out of the nest and died, so they could only withdraw in sorrow.

In 2002, the Wild Boar Man found a hawk-eagle nest in which the egg had not yet hatched. But for unknown reasons the adult birds later abandoned the nest, so Liu had to give up his plans to film there. Soon afterwards the Wild Boar Man discovered an Indian black eagle nest, and they decided that that year they would film the Indian black eagle instead.

To build a hide 20-25 meters up a tree beside a cliff in the jungle is no mean feat.

Birds of a feather

Although the starring role had changed, that year they made many advances in their techniques related to filming, including setting up a radio relay station, similar to a ham radio base station. With the relay station, Liu Yen-ming could communicate directly with the plains of Taitung, so the Wild Boar Man no longer had to make the long trip up to a mountaintop to be able to speak with Liu. This was a tremendous help for their subsequent filming.

Indian black eagles are less wary than mountain hawk-eagles, so that while Liu was filming he could climb down the tree every night to sleep. Thus he had many opportunities to spend time with the Wild Boar Man, and they got to know each other much better. It turned out that the Wild Boar Man had been deeply moved by Liu's documentary Formosan Blue Magpie, and this had started him thinking about how he could "use his own knowledge of wildlife to help wildlife." During the initial period of their cooperation, because they did not yet understand each other so well, the Wild Boar Man could not get used to Liu Yen-ming's "bigheadedness" as an artistic worker, and for a time became despondent. Later his wife urged him, "This kind of project is something you should help with," and by then he had become impressed by Liu Yen-ming's tremendous patience and perseverance. "In the end we hit it off after all!" So the Wild Boar Man finally resolved to keep his promise.

The heroic streak in the Wild Boar Man also aroused Liu's admiration. For example, many hunters will choose small game simply to enjoy the thrill of hitting their quarry. But the Wild Boar Man mainly hunted fierce wild boar, and never used traps, but always despatched the boar himself with the help of his hunting dogs. This personality trait of the Wild Boar Man also colors his opinion of different bird species. Among raptors, the crested serpent eagle eats only snakes, frogs, and cold-blooded amphibians, which the Wild Boar Man thinks shows "no class"; while the crow-black Indian black eagle is neither as intelligent nor as fierce as the mountain hawk-eagle. For the Wild Boar Man, only the mountain hawk-eagle is worthy of the name of raptor, as it not only eats fresh live prey, but dares to attack large animals. He thoroughly admires the birds.

The mother eagle brings back a freshly caughrred-bellied tree squirrel. At two months old, the eaglet is almost able to pick the carcass clean on its own.

Setbacks and promises

In the spring of 2003, taking with him four or five hunters as assistants, the Wild Boar Man spent over a month before finally finding a mountain hawk-eagle nest. The eaglet was something over a month old, which meant that they would be able to continue filming it growing up at the point where they had left off in 2001. But because at that time the Wild Boar Man had bought a piece of land below Mt. Taiwu with the intention of giving up hunting and trying his hand at business, and also because that year his search for the hawk-eagles had been particularly tortuous and exhausting, he expressed the hope that Liu Yen-ming could find an Aborigine to take over the task of building the treehouse and ferrying supplies.

"I daren't live in a hide built by anyone else!" Liu Yen-ming retorted. If he were to undertake such difficult filming, he said, the Wild Boar Man's trustworthiness, practical skills, judgment and knowledge of the forest were irreplaceable. Of course he knew that the amount he could pay was limited, and that he could not give the Wild Boar Man long-term employment. But if the Wild Boar Man could not see the project through to the end, Liu would have no choice but to give it up. Finally the Wild Boar Man relented. After all, the idea had been his own, so how could he not make the sacrifice of continuing to assist Liu?

Following this decision, the treehouse he built in 2003 was a perfect masterpiece.

"When I came to the foot of that nanmu tree and looked up, I was astounded." Liu Yen-ming saw above him a midair mansion that completely blended into the natural forest. It was not only superbly camouflaged, but boasted many thoughtful design features. For example, the metal hoops struck into the tree trunk to enable Liu to climb up were set exactly the right distance apart to match the length of his legs; the roof of the hide, made of bamboo strips, was domed so that rainwater would no longer drip inside; on the outside of the hide the Wild Boar Man had added a small square balcony for filming panoramic shots; and at the bottom of the tree he had built a little rain shelter for equipment. "I have to take my hat off to him for what he created based on the experience we had accumulated over these few years, along with his own minute observation," says Liu with heartfelt appreciation.

What they observed at this stage of the eagles' raising their young was very different from in previous years. As before, the mother eagle would feed the eaglet its morning meal mouthful by mouthful, but in the afternoon, after depositing some prey in the nest, she would go to a branch of another tree, where she would walk about, preen her feathers or take naps, staying there in view of the eaglet for several hours at a time. She was clearly trying to train the eaglet in self-reliance.

Each year in the mountain hawk-eagles' breeding season, Liu Yen-ming spent over 20 days alone in a hide up a tree deep in the mountains, to film the birds raising their young. To avoid alarming the eagles, he could not leave the hide even to go to the toilet.

Up and away

As the eaglet grew up day by day, it became able to eat all of an item of prey on its own. "Bright and early every morning, it would stand spiritedly on the edge of the nest like a soldier on sentry duty." Liu observed that at this stage, when the young eagle saw the male bird flying back to the nest it would retreat several paces with an alert expression in its eyes, and strike up a pose of readiness for battle. Then it would spread its wings and crouch down to protect its food. It really had "grown up," taking even its father for an enemy! At the same time it began to take short trips outside the nest, and every day assiduously practiced flying. It often perched on nearby branches to look all around.

Because Liu knew that the moment when the eaglet would leave the nest was fast approaching, he constantly kept a close watch on the young bird. After a full month of filming, one morning in the middle of June, after finishing its breakfast as usual the eaglet stood for a long time stock still on the edge of the nest, gazing intently at the valley opposite. Then to Liu Yen-ming's surprise it suddenly spread its wings and glided toward the valley. "A dark silhouette just like its parents, it gracefully and easily flew out of our field of vision, never to return." In his notebook, Liu recorded this moment that filled him with both joy and sorrow.

With the filming over, the next task was the postproduction work of writing the script, editing, and adding a soundtrack. Behind the scenes, Leofoo Development Co., Ltd., which is sponsoring this challenging project to the tune of almost NT$4 million, decided to have the film enlarged to 35-millimeter format and put it on in cinemas. Leofoo president Sean Chuang hoped to enable more people to become acquainted with the mountain hawk-eagle through this film, and thereby to sow the seeds of nature education.

With the work of making the film drawing to a close, Liu Yen-ming says with gratitude, "Without the Wild Boar Man I could never have filmed the mountain hawk-eagle." Seeing the Wild Boar Man's fervent desire over the last few years to switch careers and work in conservation, Liu has introduced him to various organizations and recommended him as an assistant for several forest and ornithological surveys, but without success.

The unlikely partnership between Taitung hunter Chen Hsu-huang (left) and Taipei filmmaker Liu Yen-ming (right) came about on account of the mountain hawk-eagle. For over five years they have been going deep into the mountains and overcoming many dangers to record a moving story of the forest.

The heart of the hunter

"They don't understand the abilities of a hunter," says Liu with anger. With the experience that a hunter like the Wild Boar Man brings with him, it should be highly feasible for him to change tracks and become a protector of the forests. Agencies such as the Forestry Bureau should work out ways to make this possible.

In April 2006, the Wild Boar Man led two Taiwan Panorama reporters to the spot where Liu had filmed in 2003, described by both of them as "the easiest to get to" of their filming sites. After more than an hour's bone-juddering ride in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, followed by almost an hour's trek through the virgin forest, when we arrived under the nanmu tree where they had built their hide that year we were drenched in sweat and utterly exhausted. The tree stood on a steep slope strewn with boulders. When with difficulty we sat down and looked up into the tree, at the height of the seventh or eighth floor of a city building we were surprised to see some strips of bamboo still hanging among the branches, which made us think of the difficulty and danger the Wild Boar Man had faced in building the hide, and how Liu Yen-ming had lived in it for over a month. When it drizzled the hide would be damp and stiflingly hot, while a heavy downpour would send mud and rocks sliding down the slope. When the forest was shrouded in mist it had a serene poetry, and at night the calls of wild animals would rise and fall all around. Thinking on this, we felt boundless admiration for the two men's determined perseverance in their project to film the hawk-eagle.

On the way back, we ask the Wild Boar Man whether can earn enough to live on now that he has given up hunting. Pointing at his heavily patched jeans, he says with a laugh that his life today is very simple. His wife has a stable income from her job as a teacher, which they can get by on. His income may be small, but to atone for his previous life of killing animals, he has a firm desire to do conservation work, and hopes he will have more opportunities to do so.