His latest work "Taipei Tree Frogs" just won the prize for Best Photography in the non-dramatic category at this year's Asia-Pacific Film Festival in Jakarta. Active in outdoor photography for 20 years, Liu Yen-ming has used a grass-roots methodology to write a history of Taiwan's ecology, and he has gained an international reputation as a photographer. His dedication and commitment to perfection in naturalist photography have earned him the deep respect of the conservationist community.

In 1988, Liu Yen-ming went to Liukui to produce his first environmental documentary, on Formosan blue magpies. King Hen-biau, former director of the Taiwan Provincial Forestry Experimental Institute's Liukui Branch, arranged for him to present some of his uncut footage for members of the academic community. When they saw the photos, the scholars were astonished and rated them extremely highly.

One member of the audience was Lin Yao-sung, director of National Taiwan University's department of zoology, who then happened to have a student doing research on the Formosan rock monkey. He suggested that Liu Yen-ming work together with the student to make a documentary on the Formosan rock monkey, to be presented at a conference on primates in Japan the following year.

In 1990, with support from the ROC Government Information Office, Liu Yen-ming completed Taiwan's first nature documentary, "Mao Mao Lien and Her Friends." The star of the film was the Formosan rock monkey. (See the December 1990 edition of Sinorama.)

In 1991 he won the best documentary award at Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Festival for "A Family of Formosan Blue Magpies." The following year, with funding from the Taiwan Cement Corporation, he completed "A Century of Taiwan Wild Birds." This film competed in both the 29th Annual Golden Horse Festival and a global environment film festival in Tokyo.

After he had made these films, Liu Yen-ming wanted to continue filming migratory birds which visit Taiwan in winter. During the course of his work, he had amassed many pictures of winter migrants, but he lacked research data. Therefore, he was unable to do an in-depth investigation and gave up. Nonetheless, the idea never escaped his mind.

"Asia-Pacific transportation hub" for birds

"When filming a nature documentary, there are many special conditions and requirements. The most important of these is that the filmmaker have complete research information to use as a foundation," says King Hen-biau, who produced Liu's migratory bird documentary "Taiwan Terns." This prerequisite limits the number of wildlife species which can be incorporated into the film script.

After winnowing out a number of "bird options," the tern was finally chosen as the grand prize winner. Professors Liu Hsiao-ju and Yuan Hsiao-wei of the Academia Sinica had done specialized research on the tern, and their scholarly assistance became the catalyst for this new film. With this kind of support, Liu Yen-ming was finally ready to begin actual work.

Because of Taiwan's superior geographical location, the island plays an important role in the migratory routes of birds. It wouldn't be stretching the point to call it their "Asia-Pacific transportation hub"!

Every year at the end of spring and the beginning of summer, migratory coastal birds such as sandpipers and snipes (Scolopacidae family) and plovers (Charadriidae family), shed their winter feathers and then move on to the next oasis. At the same time, many summer-resident birds fly into Taiwan, planning to procreate here.

The terns are summer resident birds that visit Taiwan in large numbers. Terns are a subfamily (Sterninae) within the gull family (Laridae). Because their outward appearance and motion in flight are strikingly similar to swallows, the Chinese call them "swallow gulls" (yan ou). The majority of terns live over open water, but when mating season arrives, they return to terra firma to bring forth the next generation. Not just any piece of land, however, can be used as their "nuptial chamber."

The blue sky, the emerald grass and the sojourning terns pay no heed to Liu Yen-ming as hesquats for hours at a time, hard at work taking pictures. What the photographer respects and loves is the beauty of the natural environment.

The harder the better

What terns love are islands uninhabited by humans, or sandy stretches where people rarely come. In Taiwan, tern habitats can be seen on a few uninhabited islands in the Penghu island group or around a very small number of river mouths on Taiwan island itself. This is because their primary food source is fish, and they must remain close to the ocean to survive. Furthermore, terns are by nature particularly afraid of being disturbed and must avoid other animals and humankind.

Interestingly, terns have the custom of living in large groups. Once they take up residence on the land, they adopt a communal lifestyle. This predilection is a cause for both chagrin and glee for the maker of nature documentaries. The vexing aspect is just how hard it is to avoid disturbing them. What is serendipitous is that once one discovers the terns' resting grounds, one can catch an intimate glimpse of the splendid pageantry of a large flock of birds. For Liu Yen-ming, the more rewarding and challenging the work, the more worthy it is to try, especially if it is filming birds.

"Birds are a very important indicator of the quality of Taiwan's environment, and migratory birds are indicators of the environment of the East Asian and the South Pacific regions," says Liu. "A Family of Formosan Blue Magpies" and "A Century of Taiwan Wild Birds" documented the local environment and birds of Taiwan island, while the production of "Taiwan Terns" moved from a local to a regional outlook. Although the scope of the film is somewhat smaller, the focus is more precise.

With the coastal birds of Taiwan as protagonists, this documentary presents the close interrelation between the environment along the seacoasts and the transitory ecosystems of migratory birds. The intent is to appeal to people to preserve the migratory birds' habitats, and "at the same time to let everyone understand that today when we leave some space for Taiwan's birds to survive, we are also leaving some living space for ourselves," says Leslie C. Koo, president of Taiwan Cement Corporation, which underwrites Liu Yen-ming's work.

Now that he had a goal and the financial means to pursue it, the question was, where should he go to recruit help and embark on his campaign?

A roseate tern soars up into the vast skies （right）. Meanwhile, Liu Yen-ming's assistants usually sit under a little parasol, honing their powers of silent discipline （left）. Once one assistant wrote seven letters to his girlfriend in the course of a single day, all right here under this little canopy.

Recruiting troops

Besides himself, serving as director and cameraman, Liu Yen-ming needed one or two assistants, to help him carry 20 kilograms of equipment, to guard the camera and to run odd errands.

But film assistants are hard to find, and few can do the job well. According to past experience, Liu points out, the common situation is, "After creeping up silently and setting up the film equipment, adjusting the lens and sighting the subject you can't move for an hour or two, for fear of frightening the flock away." Without persistence, patience and professional training, it simply can't be done well. And people who become seasick are out of the question. Overall, inexperienced assistants can do little more than help carry the equipment to the work site and then go sit in the tent set up for resting, to wait for Liu Yen-ming to finish shooting. This usually takes the entire day.

With pay at NT$1000 a day, plus getting to ride boats and airplanes, it seems like a pretty good deal, but by the third day, many people can contain themselves no longer and begin to incessantly ask, "When do we go home?" By the fourth day, they go stir crazy. Throughout the making of this film, Liu sent through eight assistants.

Filming a documentary is certainly a matter of "making hay while the sun shines." On a clear day the crew is active; when it rains, they must rest. It is also a job that requires beginning work at five in the morning when the sun comes up and shutting things down at four o'clock in the afternoon. After eating supper, the only entertainment is watching the sunset and staying on to watch the stars come out. "The landlady wouldn't let us watch TV, because she wanted to save electricity. The lamp broke and she didn't fix it, so we couldn't read books. The only light in the room was the red bulb in front of the ancestral shrine," recalls one of the assistants, Liao Jui-ming, now an associate professor of history at Soochow University. But later on, to his surprise, he began to enjoy that kind of pure life without televisions or people. For the majority of the young assistants, however, it was simply a question of whether or not they could bear it.

"You have to be able to withstand boredom and torment, to go for a dozen hours without saying a word," says Liao Jui-ming. On very small uninhabited islands, when it comes to shooting film, usually only the director/cameraman and one assistant can be present; otherwise, the terns will not alight on the island. And the workers must hunker in the blazing sunlight, "sitting in meditation" by themselves, so that the birds will slowly grow accustomed to the presence of human beings and dare to walk around in front of people.

Mental forbearance is this job's number one prerequisite.

Roseate terns （above）, bridled terns and brown noddies （upper right）, all having eaten their fill, congregate in little groups, chit-chatting, preening feathers and relaxing for a while.

You have to suffer for something great

Physical perseverance is also mandatory. Liu Yen-ming feels strongly in this regard. When filming the timid terns, one absolutely must have camouflage equipment; otherwise, as soon as the birds catch sight of strangers, they will become nervous. In order to not startle the terns, at the first rays of light, around four or five in the morning, Liu hid in a camouflage-patterned tent. Eating, drinking and "personal relief" were all carried out inside. When the scorching sun filled the air, he would be drenched in sweat from head to toe, and the only thing he wore was a pair of underpants, or else it would have been hard to survive.

Although he receives funding from the Taiwan Cement Corporation, Liu still planned his budget meticulously; he scrimped on clothes and food, unwilling to allow the tiniest degree of waste. During the first year of his filming work there, Liu asked someone to help him find accommodations on Wang-an Island. The price was NT$500 a day per person, to be paid every day. He also asked the hotel owners to make box lunches for him and his workers to take every day to the little uninhabited island where the terns had settled. However, more often than not the food was simply salted preserves. Within one summer they spent a considerable amount of money.

In the second year, Liu calculated his expenses and determined not to stay in a hotel; instead he rented a flat for NT$3000 a month. Because the hotel owners who had previously made box lunches for them wanted to avoid the extra hassle and were not interested in earning the money a second time, Liu Yen-ming and his assistants had a set routine every day of taking two buns, a packet of cookies and some canned food, plus a bottle of mineral water to the island, to take care of the necessities of life. Their life was extremely Spartan. "We couldn't take too much food, because we also had to carry the camera equipment," Liu Yen-ming explains. Every person had to save his strength and stamina, and they couldn't bring extra things. They even had to think carefully about every gulp of water they swallowed. Each person had only one bottle to live off, and no one could share their water with anyone else. Liu Yen-ming had to repeatedly counsel his young assistants to drink their water sparingly.

The first summer's work passed relatively smoothly, but because Liu Yen-ming was conscious of the potential for disaster, the second year he purchased insurance for all his assistants, to seek peace of mind. And he also made a rule that everyone wear life vests while on the job. Nevertheless, more than a few incidents took place.

（below） When preparing to descend, first draw in both wings. Evidently, this is the source of inspiration for the invention of human flying machines.

An unlucky jackpot

For example, one important part of the film was getting footage of fishermen catching banded blue sprat. It was central to demonstrating that this species of fish is not only food for nestling terns and a principal source of nutrition for adult terns, but also a delicacy among human beings. During the terns' mating season, banded blue sprat appear in large quantities in the ocean regions nearby their resting grounds. Fishermen will also seek out the banded blue sprat according to where the terns congregate.

Assistant Lu Po-ching got into a boat to help the director get extra footage of this scene. Because he didn't have on the protective rain gear or rain shoes that fishermen wear, he sat down on top of the fishing net. Perhaps at that time, there was a wound on his body, because he was infected by chiggers in the net.

After he got back to Taipei, Lu Po-ching had a chronic headache, and he also broke out in a fever. At first he thought it was a cold, and that if he took some over-the-counter medicine the matter would be resolved. To his surprise, the sickness continued, and he began to sweat profusely. Within one day, he changed ten sets of underwear. When he slept, his sheets and two layers of pillows were all soaked through. Later on, as luck would have it, a doctor whom Lu Po-ching describes as a "fortune teller" concluded that it was a disease caused by chiggers found only in Penghu and other outlying islands, and he was able to prescribe the proper cure. "If you had put off getting proper medication a little while more, your life would have been in danger!" cautioned the physician.

（lower right） The terns have elected to bring forth their next generation here. For human beings, it is an indication that the environment is pretty good. We should work hard to maintain it and provide a secure home for the birds that pass through our land.

More excitement yet to come

One day, the fishing boat set off for Wang-an Island. Not long thereafter a dense fog suddenly rolled in, blocking off all view beyond 10 meters. The little boat had no automatic piloting devices, so it floundered in the ocean for two hours, and still they could not catch a glimpse of the shore toward which they were steering. The old boat man had no choice but to cut the engine and wait until the fog lifted. The tiny, light boat rocked and swayed like a little bowl in the deep water. It swayed so wildly that one of the assistants could hold back no more and vomited up that morning's soybean milk. "I just got my PhD. It would be so terrible to die out here!" Liao Jui-ming darkly reflected. They could only steel themselves in the dead silence and helplessly stare at each other.

Fortunately, a fishing boat sailing in the vicinity gave them a little clue. They were able to face the correct direction. After half an hour had passed, far more quickly than they had anticipated, they nearly crashed into the island's reef. After more than two hours of being lost at sea, not only had they not had any way of figuring out the correct direction, there was also another cause for concern-- the ROC airforce often used this area to test-launch bombs, if by any chance they dropped a bomb while the boat was lost at sea....

Shaken by the danger, the three film-team members climbed ashore. But about an hour later the countenance of the heavens shifted. "The wind's turned into a northerly! Come back quick!" yelled the old boatman, who was waiting on the boat, though Liu Yen-ming didn't quite understand what he meant. The wind had suddenly become very strong, and the boat simply could not approach the shore. There was a bathtub-shaped sampan which was connected to the boat by a ming rope. Liu Yen-ming was unaware of the seriousness of the situation, and he thought it was no big deal. So he decided to spend the night on the island and asked the boatman to come fetch him in the morning. But the boatman entreated him so fervently that he finally agreed to leave. Amidst the furiously billowing waves, he tried to jump into the sampan six or seven times. Finally he managed to jump into the sampan, and in the end returned to the boat.

This so-called "northerly" was the biggest typhoon of the year. After they got back to port, they were stuck on Wang-an Island for four days before they could depart. Only when the old boatman got back to Wang-an did he divulge that even the equipment on the little boat was unreliable. He had not been sure whether they would ever make it back to harbor, but he didn't dare tell them the seriousness of their predicament. Liu Yen-ming, who did not know the implications of the term "northerly," escaped misfortune by sheer luck.

（lower left） Brown noddies make their homes on the sides of precipitous cliffs, and for protection their bodies are covered with feathers of a rocky ashen hue. For this reason, they are more courageous than other terns, and the lens can zero in a little closer.

From the jaws of death

When the documentary finally finished production at the end of 1994, 30,000 feet of film had ultimately been cut down to a 28-minute documentary. Because of limitations in terms of time and space and questions concerning the sufficiency of research information, the film only documents five varieties of the bird--the roseate tern, the little tern, the black-naped tern, the brown noddy, and the bridled tern. Of these, the appearance of the roseate tern is the most valuable, because it has been listed as an endangered species in many countries throughout Europe and the Americas.

Under the thorough, detailed and fluid direction of Liu Yen-ming, the terns of midsummer reveal the innermost secrets of their lives--building nests, courtship, laying eggs, nurturing their young....

--Once a male roseate tern meets a prospective mate, it will spread both wings out over the ground, performing a courtship ritual for the female tern. The motion looks like a choreographed dance. The male will also courteously carry fish in his beak to feed his "significant other" and win her favors. Scholars have termed this kind of behavior "courtship feeding."

--Most tern nests have almost no shade, so when the weather is excruciatingly hot, the mother tern will flip the egg over with her beak, to evenly modulate its temperature. They may also open their beaks and breathe on the egg to disperse its heat, or hold out a wing to provide it with shade. Even more amazing, they will diligently fly back and forth to recesses of water and wet the feathers on their underbellies, soaking the egg to cool it down.

--The brown noddy feeds its chicks differently than other terns. The parent first bites off a piece of fish, and then opens its beak and lets the chick pluck the ruminated food from its mouth. Most other terns directly feed the fish to their young.

Of all Liu Yen-ming's nature documentaries, this one used the most footage, and it makes him feel the most satisfied. He has also received all kinds of acclaim, including being selected as a finalist for the Golden Horse Award in the Best Documentary category and winning the Merit Award for Cinematography at the Fourteenth Annual International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Montana.

Nevertheless, Liu Yen-ming is not resting on his laurels. Once again he has waved goodbye, driving off in his jeep, sporting a new walkie-talkie, going deep into the mountain forests to film another documentary. Will boundless hardship force him to turn back? Never!

[Picture Caption]

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(photo by Yu Jui-lin, courtesy of Advertising Age magazine)

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The blue sky, the emerald grass and the sojourning terns pay no heed to Liu Yen-ming as hesquats for hours at a time, hard at work taking pictures. What the photographer respects and loves is the beauty of the natural environment.

p.90

A roseate tern soars up into the vast skies (right). Meanwhile, Liu Yen-ming's assistants usually sit under a little parasol, honing their powers of silent discipline (left). Once one assistant wrote seven letters to his girlfriend in the course of a single day, all right here under this little canopy.

p.92

Roseate terns (above), bridled terns and brown noddies (upper right), all having eaten their fill, congregate in little groups, chit-chatting, preening feathers and relaxing for a while.

P.92

(below) When preparing to descend, first draw in both wings. Evidently, this is the source of inspiration for the invention of human flying machines.

p.92

(lower right) The terns have elected to bring forth their next generation here. For human beings, it is an indication that the environment is pretty good. We should work hard to maintain it and provide a secure home for the birds that pass through our land.

p.93

(lower left) Brown noddies make their homes on the sides of precipitous cliffs, and for protection their bodies are covered with feathers of a rocky ashen hue. For this reason, they are more courageous than other terns, and the lens can zero in a little closer.

p.93

(below) The roseate terns always stay together in couples. Unless something unexpected happens, they will never get divorced.

p.94

This little sampan has saved many lives. Of course, if you manage to jump into it in the middle of a tempestuous "northerly," you'll also have to thank the good deeds of your ancestors and the divine aid of God. (photo by Yu Jui-lin, courtesy of Advertising Age magazine)

p.95

The mountains reflect the bright sun; the heavens merge with the sea. But Liu Yen-ming and his assistant have no time to enjoy the lovely scenery. They must carry their equipment while being extra careful of the holes underfoot; otherwise, they may fall in and say farewell to the world forever.

p.96

Amazing! Is it the tango or classical ballet?

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Shouldering his old partner, Liu Yen-ming marches forward. It is the starting point for the next stop, not the return journey. (photo by Yu Jui-lin, courtesy of Advertising Age magazine)

（below） The roseate terns always stay together in couples. Unless something unexpected happens, they will never get divorced.

This little sampan has saved many lives. Of course, if you manage to jump into it in the middle of a tempestuous "northerly," you'll also have to thank the good deeds of your ancestors and the divine aid of God. （photo by Yu Jui-lin, courtesy of Advertising Age magazine）

The mountains reflect the bright sun; the heavens merge with the sea. But Liu Yen-ming and his assistant have no time to enjoy the lovely scenery. They must carry their equipment while being extra careful of the holes underfoot; otherwise, they may fall in and say farewell to the world forever.

Amazing! Is it the tango or classical ballet?

Shouldering his old partner, Liu Yen-ming marches forward. It is the starting point for the next stop, not the return journey. （photo by Yu Jui-lin, courtesy of Advertising Age magazine）