Twenty years of pursuit
Braving the bright sun for an hour or two that morning, Lin spots courting crested goshawks, a circling crested serpent eagle, and a fleeting black eagle. He notes down the positions and behaviors of all three raptor species.
In the afternoon, he drives to a road within the boundaries of the botanical garden to wait for black eagle, but sees nothing. The next day he treks high up the mountain to his private eagle-viewing point, a 25-meter-tall steel-frame tower, which he painstakingly climbs.
“Black eagles like to fly along crest lines, and this place has the best view. You can observe and photograph eagles in detail from a short range. If we’re lucky, we might see a black eagle driving away a mountain hawk-eagle,” says Lin, who estimates that on a clear day, the chances of seeing a black eagle are quite good. After sitting atop the rickety tower for a couple hours, we see only a crested serpent eagle circling a few times in the sky. No black eagles show up. Later, a fog rolls in so we have to get going.
“When the weather is fine, the chances of seeing eagles aren’t. I’ve been in the field hundreds of times, and this is a common situation,” says Lin. Raptors are quite hard to fathom.
Of Taiwan’s eight resident diurnal raptor species, the black eagle is the most mysterious. Although it had been identified during Japanese rule, it wasn’t until the 1980s that birdwatching started to become popular in Taiwan, but even then hobbyists and academic researchers learned little about the black eagle.
Now the black eagle’s secrets are being uncovered one by one, and Lin’s two decades of constant research have much to do with it.
Lin served as a volunteer guide for the Wild Bird Society of Taipei while still in high school. After graduating from National Chiao Tung University, he worked as a computer engineer at the Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology. But answering the call of the wild, at age 27 he decided to become a full-time birder. In 1989 he served as an assistant with the Chinese Wild Bird Federation, and was a pioneer in counting the tens of thousands of grey-faced buzzards in Kending.
Lin formed the RRGT in 1994 with like-minded enthusiasts, and thanks to a cadre of volunteers, they were able to conduct detailed observations and compile breeding records of raptors from small besras and mid-sized crested goshawks to large crested serpent eagles and black eagles.
Fu-Shan Botanical Garden is home to many wildlife species. The emerald green tree frog (Rhacophorus prasinatus), bronzed drongo, Formosan macaque, and Reeve’s muntjac can all frequently be seen there.