Dafen, bear kingdom
Hwang's students and volunteers have since last October made this journey across mountains and rivers to the Dafen area once a month, or five times in all. Going all the way back to 2006, when the Yushan National Park Headquarters commissioned the black bear research program, this marks the fifth year of struggling up to Dafen.
Hwang's fateful connection with Dafen dates back to her PhD dissertation. When she went to the US in 1996 to begin her doctoral studies, she originally thought to continue working on the subject of her MA thesis: the crab-eating mongoose. But because she came to admire the work of the ursologist David Garshelis, she suddenly decided to become his student and thrust herself body and soul into the very difficult field of bear research.
At that time there was very little knowledge about the black bear among academics in Taiwan. Wang Ying of the Department of Life Science at National Taiwan Normal University had done a preliminary survey of the distribution of black bears across the island, but that was about it. There wasn't even any basic data about the habits of black bears or their numbers.
In order to better understand the habits and range of black bears in the wild, it was necessary to do traditional trapping and tagging. After returning to Taiwan for her doctoral research, Hwang put out bear bait in more than 60 locations on Mt. Lala and Mt. Chuyun and in Yushan National Park where black bears were most likely to appear. The place with the most bears would be the place where she would do the actual trapping. Unfortunately, virtually all of the bait went untouched; the only place where there were claw marks was on a tree on the way to Walami in the Yushan National Park.
Later on, when interviewing Bunun hunters, she found that they all had the same advice: "If you want to trap bears, go to Dafen." They knew that the bears congregate there every winter to eat the acorns of the Japanese blue oak. Hwang then visited the site herself and discovered bear feces, claw marks, footprints, and other signs. So she steeled herself to working in Dafen, a place that the academic community had previously seen as too forbidding to venture into.
During more than two years of research, working with Bunun people and national park ranger Lin Yuan-yuan, they set up many traps, and trapped 15 black bears, far exceeding their expectations.
Hwang recalls the situation the very first time they trapped a bear: It was pouring with rain, the bear was roaring and struggling, and the blow darts with the anesthetic either didn't hit the mark or were shaken off by the bear. After their second and third bears, they gradually got more practiced at doping their subjects, but it was still necessary to accurately insert the anesthetic with the bear right up in your face, and then rapidly complete weighing and measuring, taking a blood sample, inserting a chip, attaching a transmitter, and other tasks. Even then, the process was not considered to be a success until the team, hidden not far away, confirmed that the bear had safely walked away.
And that was just the preliminaries! After attaching wireless transmitters on one bear after another, Hwang and her volunteers then had to undertake the long and patient mission of "bear tracking" deep in the mountains.
Where there's no trail, climb; where there's no bridge, wade-this is how Hwang Mei-hsiu and her team have sharpened their wilderness skills and endurance.