Flowing northwards for over 100 kilometres along the narrow valley between the Central Range and Taiwan's east coast, the Hsiukuluan River's mighty waters nourish villages on both banks. Along its middle reaches between Yuli and Fuli, rice fields irrigated by the Hsiukuluan River constitute the breadbasket of East Taiwan.

Every year the Hsiukuluan River's broad bed is also home to migratory wild geese and ducks escaping the Siberian and Manchurian winters. The river's green water weeds and water plants, together with the fish, shrimps and aquatic insects that shelter in its rock pools, provide nourishment for these distant southern migrants who thus build up their strength each year for the long journey back north.

For many years these migrants settled on the Hsiukuluan River while farmers made their living along its banks, the river happily sustaining both....

But now conflict has arisen between these two groups, disturbing their former peaceful coexistence.

During the past two or three years, farmers near Yuli have found their rice paddies being damaged by unwelcome guests. From September to the following spring, when the first and second rice crops are sown, the rice shoots are being torn up by the roots and the seedlings eaten, leaving the paddies strewn with fallen shoots as if by some mischievous child.

The farmers knew that rats don't infest paddy fields, and that the little egret which habitually stalks rice paddies is only after insects; so the omnivorous wild ducks which visit the Hsiukuluan River's banks from September onwards became the prime suspects.

Jealous of every grain of their rice, the farmers kept watch day and night and soon discovered a previously rare sight: at dusk and dawn, dozens of wild duck were flying over from the river and settling in flocks on the rice paddies. By the time the farmers approached, the ducks had either flown off or quickly taken refuge in weed-grown irrigation ditches.

From the damage to his fields, affected farmer Li Min-hsiung of Yuli's Ch'ang-liang village concludes: "The ducks probe the mud in search of intact rice seeds, so they always go for the roots of seedlings planted within the past fortnight."

The damaged rice seedlings, scattered right and left, cannot be recovered mechanically and have to be picked up by hand, and the farmers began complaining. Li Min-hsiung's children, home from college in Taichung and Taipei, had to spend their Chinese New Year holiday salvaging rice seedlings crippled by wild ducks.

Irritated farmers took steps to control the menace. In addition to lifelike scarecrows springing up on all sides, the green rice paddies beside the Hsiukuluan River were decked with a motley show of white and colored flags, nylon raffia, and plastic bags fluttering in the breeze.

But these traditional methods weren't very effective against wild ducks. As many farmers discovered, the ducks were so bold and intelligent they just ignore the scarecrows and flags after the first couple of days. So around dusk and dawn the farmers set off rockets, burned old tires and lit oil lamps..., and even set up bird nets in the fields. "But the ducks seldom fall for it," says Yu Shih-ting of Ch'ang-liang's VACRS farm management committee, shaking his head and at the end of his tether over these waterfowl.

They've been through every bird-scaring trick in the book, but still this seesaw battle between man and bird goes on beside the Hsiukuluan River as regular as clockwork every autumn. Last September it came to the notice of the plant conservation department at Hualien District Agricultural Improvement Station, who sent personnel to carry out an on-the-spot investigation into this bird pest.

According to Hsu Pao-hsiung, a research assistant at the department, farmers along all the Taitung-Hualien rift valley's three northsouth flowing rivers, the Hualien River, Hsiukuluan River and Peinan River, occasion ally see flocks of wild geese and ducks, but they only invade rice paddies in the area concentrated on the middle reaches of the Hsiukuluan River, in the Yuli area. Up to a third of the over 200 hectares of rice paddy in Yuli are damaged by waterfowl during the planting season, with at worst over 30 percent of the seedlings in each field being laid waste. Wild ducks have even been seen lingering in the rice fields during the summer harvesting season, never bothering to return north at all.

Curious as to why these waterfowl should leave their river bed home and invade farm fields, Hsu Pao-hsiung and his colleagues launched an enquiry to find the reasons and so pinpoint solutions to the problem.

On the Pacific rim and midway between the northern and southern hemispheres, Taiwan is a major way-station for north-south migrating birds. Migrants from Siberia, Manchuria, Korea and Japan reaching Taiwan follow along either the west or the east coast.

The majority are attracted by the numerous broad river estuaries and rich tidal marshes and mud-flats along Taiwan's west coast, so there are far fewer migrant birds, and of fewer species, on the steeper eastern coast. Many of the wild geese and duck species which migrate between the hemispheres, all of which Taiwan's farmers lump together as waterfowl, do not just transit through Taiwan but stay for the winter. They stay for quite a lengthy period, and don't necessarily settle on the coast or on estuaries, often following rivers upstream or flying directly over the mountains to inland watercourses in search of somewhere safe to feed and rest on their journey. The relatively undeveloped and pollution-free Hsiukuluan River draws multitudes of wild geese and ducks, who gather in droves.

An ROC Ornithological Society survey has shown that wild geese and ducks congregate along the middle reaches of the Hsiukuluan River because the more densely inhabited lower reaches are frequented by boaters, which explains why they are most often sighted around Yuli. As for their invasion of the paddy fields, an objective environmental study by the Agricultural Improvement Station has established that the answer lies in the Hsiu kuluan River itself.

"The river has changed out of recognition in recent years," says Hsu Pao-hsiung, expressing his amazement at the transformation that has overtaken it. The flood plain used to be wide and marshy, but today its banks have been narrowed by levees, its course straightened, and the bed of the river raised, so that the water has soaked away leaving dry river bed inhospitable to waterfowl.

Mining for ophiolite and unlicensed logging for hardwood timber such as shoghu has affected the Chingshui River, an upstream tributary of the Hsiukuluan, creating an alluvium of gravel that has collected along the river bed, raising it almost level with the bridges across its middle reaches.

Land on the flood plain has been leased to farmers by the county government, and irrigation for these new paddy fields has further depleted the river. Pollution from pesticides has in turn affected interrupted biological life cycles in the river.

From bank to bank, the new section of levee at Yuli is on average 50 meters narrower than the old one. Where the river used to meander along and overflow into the flood plain, watering the vegetation growing along its banks, all this vegetation has now been cleared away leaving the flood plain tidier but barren. Illegal cultivation of high-value, quick-growing crops such as water melon and sweetcorn has turned the dry river bed into monotonous market gardens.

Like many water birds, wild geese depend on the riparian vegetation for shelter and live on food from the water, but development is causing much of the habitat of fish, shrimps, aquatic insects and plants to disappear. "To survive, geese and ducks must feed in the paddy fields," concludes Hsu Pao-hsiung's report on the problem.

His view is shared, coincidentally, by Tunghai University professor Chang Wan-fu, who grew up in the village of Ch'un-jih-li on the banks of the Hsiukuluan River and has a special interest in environmental change affecting the river. He recalls that twenty or thirty years ago local children would chase the myriad "water birds on the river, but in the past decade farming has come to the flood plain and development is extending even to the river bed..., transforming the river's ecology out of all recognition. "Now you no longer see large flocks of wild ducks sporting on the river bed," he says.

Battles like that between the Hsiukuluan farmers and the wild ducks are commonplace. Sparrows haunt threshing floors and cannot be driven off; on the west coast, egrets often steal fish and shrimps from breeding ponds. In fact, birds probably discovered farmers' fields were a rich source of food at the very dawn of human history, and it may be that conflict between men and birds has its roots in remote antiquity.

But such conflicts tend to arise "generally because their original feeding habitat has been destroyed, so they go for the next best thing and invade human territory," indicates Hsu Chien-chung of the ROC Ornithological Society.

Man's demands on the environment are reducing the scope for other living things, and even threatening the continuation of life. Bird populations and species numbers are declining drastically, for example, apart from those few, like sparrows, which can cope with the human environment.

The ROC Ornithological Society has been studying Taiwan's annual migrant bird population for the past ten years or so, and has found steady negative growth along the west coast from the Kuantu estuary at Tamsui southward via the Chu-an and Tatu estuaries to the Tsengwen estuary at Tainan, due to aquaculture and industrial development, along with oil and garbage pollution.

In the past three years there have never been more than 1,000 migratory birds at any one time on the Hsiukuluan River. According to Liao Sheng-fu, general affairs supervisor at Taitung's Fengli Elementary School and the man responsible for the society's East Taiwan bird population survey, this may be why the Hsiukuluan River bird population is only concentrated at certain points. Within the environment as a whole, birds are an insignificant crop pest compared to the damage from disease, insects and rodents. Hsu Pao-hsiung adds that this is the first time the Hualien Agricultural Improvement Station has ever carried out a "bird pest" survey.

But damage is being done, and farmers cannot be expected to sacrifice their income for the sake of waterfowl. How does one balance the separate interests of farmers and wild ducks?

As Liao Sheng-fu points out, governments concerned for the environment ask farmers not to kill birds that encroach upon their fields, and pay them compensation calculated on the basis of objective data. "It's ra ther like compensation for typhoon or flood damage," is his analogy.

To protect the flocks ofranes that migrate from Siberia every winter, the local government in Kagoshima, on the Japanese island of Kyushu, rents the farmland where they roost as a bird sanctuary. Once the birds have left, the farmers may till the land as usual.

Pressure of development in many advanced industrial nations means that bird sanctuaries are the only place left where migratory birds can roost.

In 1983 the Taipei City Government decided to set up Taiwan's first migratory bird sanctuary at Kuantu, but their plans have been overtaken by the pace of development. Land prices in the area have risen 30-fold, and the city government has still not officially established the sanctuary due to difficulties over funding purchase of the land.

In the United States, provision for buying land for conservation areas is included in the federal budget, but this is slow in coming. So conservation groups usually raise funds to rescue the natural environment, and once the federal budget is approved the funds are withdrawn for use elsewhere.

Is there a conflict of interest between protecting natural resources (including birds) and human development of resources? In fact, all living species in nature are bound by complex relations of interdependency. Each species has its own value, and even super-ficially harmful birds have their value for human survival.

"We can't simply decide whether a species of bird is beneficial or harmful on the basis of its affect on man, and then just kill off the harmful ones." Chen Chao-jen, a specialist with the Council of Agriculture's conservation division who is handling the case, explains that if large flocks of wild ducks are seriously damaging farmers' crops, then conservationists have no objection to artificial means being used to control their numbers, provided they have a real understanding of the species.

Is the bird population really too large for the area? How much affect do they really have on crops? Which species of wild ducks are invading the fields? What are their habits?.... This data is necessary for drawing up a proper control strategy. If people just kill them because they're a nuisance, once the birds are found to be an important part of the natural cycle it'll be too late to do anything about it.

If more is understood about water birds it should be easy to find a way of stopping them invading paddy fields. But this information needs to be gathered routinely, for use as and when required. More ornithological studies are being carried out now, but they tend to concentrate on resident birds, and apart from the size of population we still have only limited knowledge about the migrant birds that are part of our global heritage.

The Hsiukuluan River conflict between man and bird has alerted the authorities. In addition to providing farmers with methods of scaring birds, the Department of Agriculture and Forestry's conservation section has decided to commission a deeper study from the ROC Ornithological Society of the habits and numbers of wild ducks on the Hsiukuluan River.

But resolving the conflict may depend on reducing development and pollution of the flood plain, since peace will only be restored once the birds have somewhere to feed and live. The Hualien Agricultural Improvement Station is calling upon the county government to actively put a stop to illegal farming on the flood plain.

Birds and humans spart, we ought to restore the Hsiukuluan River, host to numerous life forms, to its natural clean state. The wild ducks' abnormal behavior may just be the river's way of giving man a hint as to what should be done.

[Picture Caption]

Yuli farmers bedeck their fields with waving banners to frighten off wild geese and ducks.

(Above) When scarecrows have done all they can, farmers help them out with firecrackers and blazing oil lamps. These plastic tubs are used by farmers as oil lamps.

(Below) Firecrackers are let off on festive occasions, but Li Min-hsiung is letting off rockets to scare away birds.

(Above) In this damaged rice field there's only one webbed footprint, the others are egret and rail tracks.

(Left) Farmers say the wild geese and ducks go for intact seeds at the foot of rice shoots.

(Right) Large numbers of migrant ducks have been caught by farmers.

The bed of the Hsiukuluan River has been developed into fields, destroying the habitat of wild geese and ducks which have now taken to feeding in rice paddies.

Man's development and utilization of natural resources has affected the roosting grounds of migratory birds. Pictures like this scene of young ducks on the Tamsui River near Huachiang Bridge are growing ever harder to shoot. (photo by Kuo Chih-yang)

（Above） When scarecrows have done all they can, farmers help them out with firecrackers and blazing oil lamps. These plastic tubs are used by farmers as oil lamps.

（Below） Firecrackers are let off on festive occasions, but Li Min-hsiung is letting off rockets to scare away birds.

（Above） In this damaged rice field there's only one webbed footprint, the others are egret and rail tracks.

（Left） Farmers say the wild geese and ducks go for intact seeds at the foot of rice shoots.

（Right） Large numbers of migrant ducks have been caught by farmers.

The bed of the Hsiukuluan River has been developed into fields, destroying the habitat of wild geese and ducks which have now taken to feeding in rice paddies.

Man's development and utilization of natural resources has affected the roosting grounds of migratory birds. Pictures like this scene of young ducks on the Tamsui River near Huachiang Bridge are growing ever harder to shoot. （photo by Kuo Chih-yang）