"This patch of forest is done for." When in the spring of this year I went with the "Wild Boar Man" Chen Hsu-huang on a trip to visit the area of Machilus japonica forest where Liu Yen-ming filmed the mountain hawk-eagle in 2003, we were surprised to see spray-painted in red on the trunks of many of the huge trees the character jie ("boundary"), followed by a person's name. The Wild Boar Man said with worry that this stretch of woodland was on Aboriginal reserve land, but had previously not been registered in anyone's name. But these markings meant that recently someone had applied to lease land here, and land registry personnel had come to measure its boundaries.

As one conservationist in Pingtung County describes, Aborigines registered as living locally can apply to lease a plot of reserve land to clear it for farming or afforestation. They usually apply for permission to cut down trees on the land that form an "obstruction." Apart from selling the timber they cut down in this way, they can get a tree-planting subsidy of NT$300,000 per hectare, and in subsequent years can also receive annual subsidies of several tens of thousands of NT dollars. "If you cut down natural forest to plant new trees, isn't this a death sentence for the wildlife there?" he questions. Ironically, all of this is legal.

According to overseas research, birds of prey are highly territorial animals. The essential survival resources that their territories provide are food, nesting sites, and space to seek a mate. To win and defend a territory they are willing to pay any price, and even to fight to the death. But this kind of piecemeal tree felling causes fragmentation of their habitat, and is inevitably a threat to their survival.

King Hen-biao, director of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, who has assisted Liu Yen-ming's filming of nature documentaries over many years, says that the leasing of Aboriginal reserve land is indeed a loophole in the law. He says that in the state-owned forests under the management of the Forestry Bureau, the felling of old-growth trees has long been prohibited by law; so why can't local governments, which are responsible for administering Aboriginal reserve lands, protect the natural forest there?

Mountain hawk-eagles have the largest territories of any raptor in Taiwan. According to the only Taiwanese survey of them to date, made by Lin Wen-hung of the Raptor Research Group of Taiwan, Associate Professor Sun Yuan-hsun of the Institute of Wildlife Conservation at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, and the Taitung Wild Bird Society, mountain hawk-eagles are mainly active in virgin broadleaf and mixed broadleaf/coniferous forests at medium to low elevations. According to a new estimate made by Lin Wen-hung in 2004, their total population is probably less than 500 individuals. But because to date no capture and release programs have been carried out to establish the size of adult birds' range, the accuracy of Lin's estimate is open to doubt.

Sun Yuan-hsun states that we currently only know that adult mountain hawk-eagles in Japan are active in ranges of around 11-16 square kilometers. Thus far, researchers in Taiwan have only been able to map the ranges of juvenile birds, which were some 40 kilometers long from north to south and 20 kilometers broad. But because juvenile birds have not yet established a fixed territory, they can be expected to have a larger range than adult birds.

Under pressure

Whenever Liu Yen-ming has stayed in a filming hide in the mountains in recent years, he has often heard gunshots echoing up from the valleys. He says that although the Wildlife Conservation Act (WCA) came into force in 1989, it does not appear to have succeeded in deterring illegal hunting. Over the many years that Liu has been going into the forests, he has seen no reduction in the number of gin traps, bird nets and so on, and he often sees spent cartridges on the ground.

"Hunting pressure is currently the biggest threat to the mountain hawk-eagle's survival," says Sun Yuan-hsun. He says that the eagles are mainly active in natural forests where logging is prohibited, and although Aboriginal reserve lands are less well protected, they are mainly on the edges of natural forests, so that they occupy a relatively small portion of the eagles' habitat. Thus it is hunting driven by the Aboriginal "feather culture" that poses the greater threat. At the request of the Forestry Bureau, from 2004 to 2005 Sun monitored mountain hawk-eagle populations in the mountains around Southern and Northern Mt. Tawu, and by interviewing hunters, surveyed trends in the number of eagles caught.

Sun's survey, covering Wutai, Taiwu, Laiyi and Chunjih Townships, four areas of Taitung County with mainly Aboriginal populations, suggested that in the 1970s the number of mountain hawk-eagles caught by hunters began to rise rapidly, and this trend continued into the 1980s, when 13-14 birds were being caught per year. In the 1990s this went down to around ten birds, but since 2000 it has gone up again, to between ten and 18 birds a year. Of the 24 hunters Sun interviewed in Laiyi Township in the west of Pingtung, where the largest numbers of birds were caught, over half had caught mountain hawk-eagles after the WCA took effect in 1989.

Sun Yun-hsun says that the residents of the four townships are mainly Paiwan and Rukai Aborigines. The nobility and chieftains of both these peoples have a tradition of wearing mountain hawk-eagle feathers, and this has given rise to a trade in eagle feathers.

Eagle-feather culture

"The flight feathers of a mountain hawk-eagle have a row of triangles very similar to the pattern of the 100-pace viper," says Wang Ke-hsiao, former president the Tainan Wild Bird Society. Thus for the Paiwan and Rukai, who venerate the 100-pacer as an ancestral spirit and guardian spirit, the hawk-eagle has always been a symbol of heroism. For example, in the Paiwan tradition, only a high chieftain could wear the longest primary flight feathers, while other chieftains could wear the shorter flight feathers. But in recent years the traditional societal rules of the Aboriginal peoples have held ever less sway, and nowadays any Aborigine may wear eagle feathers as they see fit. With the development of tourism and cultural enterprises in Aboriginal villages, illegal sales of hawk-eagle feathers have become a powerful trend.

According to Sun Yuan-hsun's survey, before the trade in mountain hawk-eagles began, after plucking the flight feathers from an eagle a chieftain would release the bird, or keep it in captivity to collect more feathers at a later date. (Because the feathers fade, they need to be replaced at regular intervals). However, the trade in feathers entered the tribal villages at a time when the customs regarding the wearing of feathers were changing. Businesspeople wanted to make the "best use" of the eagles by taking more feathers, but this left the birds unable to fly, so they had to be "got rid of." After the WCA took effect, hunters began to worry that if they kept a captured hawk-eagle they would fall foul of the law, which only made the eagles' plight worse.

In the market for raptors, the price of a mountain hawk-eagle has always far outstripped other birds of prey. According to the owner of a craft shop in Laiyi Township that has been selling hawk-eagle feathers for over ten years, a single long flight feather can sell for almost NT$20,000, while other feathers fetch prices ranging from several thousand NT dollars to over NT$10,000. The Paiwan people also have a custom of making a "feather fan" from hawk-eagle tail feathers, for use at weddings. Thus the plumage of a mountain hawk-eagle can fetch a total of NT$80,000, which is no small temptation for an illegal hunter.

The WCA as it stood had failed to remove the pressure of hunting. Considering the situation to be serious, the Forestry Bureau, as the central government agency in charge of administering the act, put forward amendments that were enacted in 2004. These allow Aboriginal peoples to hunt or kill wild animals, with a license, to meet the needs of their traditional culture or rites. But the regulations to govern such hunting, including permitted hunting methods, species, areas, open seasons and numbers, have to be drawn up in consultation with the Council of Indigenous Peoples, in accordance with the cultural needs of the different Aboriginal peoples.

Hsia Jung-sheng, chief of the Forestry Bureau's Conservation Division, states that before such regulations can be finalized it is necessary to collect basic data, including the distribution and population of the mountain hawk-eagle, and whether the numbers being hunted are affecting their overall survival. Then an overall assessment must be made taking account of such perspectives as cultural needs and the need to ensure a minimum rate of reproduction.

Based on the experience of the US government in setting up eagle shelters on Amerindian reservations to provide Native Americans with the feathers they need for their rituals, Sun Yuan-hsun suggests that a mountain hawk-eagle conservation center could be set up in Pingtung County's Laiyi Township to take in eagles injured by illegal hunting. Those not fit for release back into the wild could be kept for breeding, and the feathers that juvenile birds naturally shed each year could supply Aboriginal cultural needs, while assuring species survival.

However, with environmental pressure and the untrammeled inroads of hunting, conservationists doubt whether the hawk-eagle population can hold out until the new regulations are introduced. When one day the colors on the feathers have all faded away and the haughty silhouette of the mountain hawk-eagle is gone from Taiwan's forests, how great will our sorrow be?