Taiwan has won praise for its efforts to conserve birdlife, a sign that some draconian laws are being properly enforced. But industrialization continues to exact a price, and the future of the black-billed spoonbill is still far from assured.
Earlier this year, Taiwan was in the throes of its second direct presidential election campaign, and the race had narrowed itself down to a neck and neck contest between three front runners. Suddenly, however, another contender came on the scene, and a highly unusual one at that--a storklike, black-and-white bird called the black-faced spoonbill. The reason for its appear ance on the hustings provides interesting background to Taiwan's endeavors in the wildlife protection arena.
There are very few black-faced spoonbills left in the world, and every winter Taiwan plays host to approximately two -thirds of their total number. Strong local laws protect them and their environment, for the moment at any rate, but their winter habitat in Chiku, Tainan County in southern Taiwan, is under threat from a recently approved industrial development project. So at a press conference organized by students from the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University (NTU), environmentalists called on residents to support the birds in a campaign entitled "Elect the Black-faced Spoonbill as the Millennium President." Not surprisingly, their efforts received widespread media coverage, once again focusing attention on the ever intensifying conflict between ecological preservation and the island's economic development.
This is not a new problem. In the April 1996 issue of the Free China Review, the president of the Wild Bird Society of the ROC (WBS) was quoted as saying, "If I had to wager, I'd say yes, the black-faced spoonbill will be here five years from now. We have to think there is hope." More than four years on, the birds have just enjoyed a winter sojourn in Taiwan as usual. So does that mean the future is bright? The omens are mixed.
For three days at the end of last January, various Asian affiliates of BirdLife International, a global alliance dedicated to preserving wild birds and their habitats, monitored sightings of the black-faced spoonbill. Correspondents reported seeing 772 birds, 488 of them in Taiwan. Both figures represent a record high. Unfortunately, however, the statistics do not tell the whole story. A little background may help bring the issue into focus.
This migratory bird is the rarest of the world's six varieties of spoonbill. Every year they fly south from locations in the Korean Peninsula and northeast China, and more than 60 percent of them come to Taiwan. It is thought that some merely stop over on their way to winter habitats near Hong Kong and in Vietnam. Others, however, remain all winter.
The Taiwanese have taken them to their hearts. The arrival of the spoonbills is trumpeted in the media. Numerous schools and communities arrange trips to the Tsengwen Estuary, a relatively small area of mangrove swamp and tidal mudflat near Tainan that seems to be a perfect habitat for the spoonbills, with a nearby plethora of fish farms to help supplement their diet. Birdwatchers have a field day, volunteers step up patrols designed to protect the feathered visitors from harm, and their eventual departure is attended with almost as much hoo-hah as their arrival. The spoonbill candidate might not have won the presidential election, but it is safe to say that it could have counted on a goodly number of votes.
Despite its popularity, however, the black-faced spoonbill's Taiwan habitat is far from secure. The immediate threat comes from the planned Pinnan Industrial Complex, slated to be built on the site of a lagoon to the north of the Tsengwen Estuary, right under the spoonbills' annual flyway. The developers originally wanted to fill in the whole lagoon, but the ROC's Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) eventually came down in favor of allowing them to use no more than 5 percent. Nevertheless, any alteration to the lagoon's ecological system will affect wildlife there, notes Jewel Yang, a student at NTU's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning and a fervent advocate of the black-faced spoonbills. "A lagoon is a very sensitive thing," she says. "The slightest change can harm its entire environment and biodiversity."
Help was initially at hand in the shape of a plan to construct a nature reserve in and around the Tsengwen Estuary, but so far that remains a paper project. The Tainan County government now says that the reserve will not incorporate fishing farms to the east, where the wintering spoonbills often forage. Su Yung-ming, who heads up the nature reserve section of the county government's Bureau of Agriculture, says that this is the major reason why the EPA has held off authorizing the establishment of this nature reserve, which is meant to provide a home for numerous natural resources, such as mangroves, as well as the spoonbills.
Some people derive comfort from the belief that progress is just a matter of time. "Of course, local governments have to take a lot of things into consideration when they're thinking about setting up a nature reserve, and that includes local devel opment," says Wang Shou-ming, an official at the Resources Conservation Division of the Council of Agriculture's Forestry Department. It takes a while for local interests to reach a consensus, but talks about setting up a reserve at the estuary started eight years ago, and there is still no end in sight. "Lots of Taiwan's coastal areas were zoned for various development projects a long time ago," Wang says. "If now we want to change them into nature reserves, that involves a lot of negotiating between the authorities concerned."
The establishment of a nature reserve is just the first step. "Reserves have been set up, but none of them is well looked after," notes Tainan County Bureau of Agriculture section chief Su Yung-ming, who blames budgetary constraints for the neglect. He also feels that many people are disinclined to protest development projects, since for them development means prosperity, and no pol wants to risk offending voters by hitting them in their pockets.
Outside of government, however, there are some bright spots on the horizon. The number of bird lovers in Taiwan is undoubtedly rising. Before the Chinese Wild Bird Federation (CWBF) was founded in 1988 under its original name of the Wild Bird Society of the ROC, there were only two wild bird societies in Taiwan, in Kaohsiung and Taipei respectively. Today, more than twenty of them exist around the island, including one recently founded in Matsu, an offshore islet with a population of less than 7,000. Eighteen of these societies are CWBF affiliates, and it is usually the CWBF that represents Taiwan in the international arena, for example by attending meetings on bird protection and conservation. The organization, which claims to have more than 10,000 members, is also responsible for allocating the subsidies that are occasionally paid by the Council of Agriculture (COA) to support research projects and educational activities.
Another hopeful sign is that, of Taiwan's thirteen wildlife refuges, eight specialize in the protection of wild birds. The latest one is a refuge for terns in Matsu, set up earlier this year. Moreover, the first cross-strait ornithological seminar was held in 1994, followed three years later by the first islandwide seminar on local bird life. Both are now regular biennial events.
If residents have become more aware of the importance of nature conservation, that is at least partly due to the efforts of associations that organize regular bird-watching activities. One of the best-known of these is the Huajiang Waterfowl Season, planned jointly by the Wild Bird Society of Taipei and the Taipei City government's Bureau of Reconstruction.
This series of activities, which has been going strong since 1987, starts in January and runs through March. The organ izers provide guides and set up telescopes for visitors' use at Huajiang Waterfowl Park beside the Tamsui River, north of Taipei, which is one of the island's thirteen wildlife refuges. This year, bird-watchers were able to see several rare species, including the Baikal teal. The climax of the season is a one-day event featuring educational performances and displays. This has proved so popular that on certain days in recent years the number of visitors has approached 10,000.
One of the best-organized societies is the Black-faced Spoonbill Conservation Association, the island's only club de voted to a single species of wild bird. The association can arrange trips around the Tsengwen Estuary lagoon on a bamboo raft; it also provides tour guides who accompany visitors as they meander through the maze of salt flats, fish farms, oyster beds, and mangroves. Such ecotourism has attracted tens of thousands of people since the group was founded in 1997. Liu Liang-li, one of its researchers, believes that visitors should get to know the entire ecosystem, in which the black-faced spoonbill is only one of many life forms. "We shouldn't concentrate exclusively on the bird when we're arguing against the Pinnan Industrial Complex, which would affect lots of other things in the lagoon," Liu says. "But some conservation organi zations do, and that only makes pro-development fishermen hate the bird more."
CWBF's president is Simon Liao, a great believer in on-the-spot education. He says people have to experience nature before they can love it. "That's why CWBF always encourages them to go out on weekends and get close to our coastlines, wetlands, and birds," he explains. In early March this year, CWBF organized a bird conservation exhibition in Chiku, spon sored by Cannon Taiwan (Volvo's local representative company) and the COA, where wild bird societies from around the island set up stalls to showcase their conservation achievements. It also laid on shuttle buses to the Tsengwen Estuary so that people could bid farewell to the black-faced spoonbills, which come to Taiwan in late September and start their northward homeward journey in batches during March.
A more affluent lifestyle, coupled with increased leisure time, has undoubtedly helped boost residents' awareness of conservation issues. But the island's growing wealth has had another, more direct effect: Nowadays, people do not have to snare wild birds for food or other purposes, such as turning a profit by preserving them as specimens. "And the popularity of Buddhism in Taiwan has always given a boost to wildlife conservation," Liao adds in a reference to the religion's well-known abhorrence of taking life.
NTU's Jewel Yang, however, draws a different lesson from the island's prosperity: Taiwan can now afford to put devel opment on the back burner and concentrate on becoming "nature-friendly." "We really don't need the planned Pinnan Indus trial Complex and its heavy industries anymore," she declares emphatically. "High-tech industries and ecotourism are what we should be looking at in the future." She thinks that Chen Shui-bian's election as the ROC's first non-Kuomintang presi dent represents an excellent chance to change the island's economic culture. Will it come about? "We'll just have to wait and see," Yang says.
Pressure from the international community also helped Taiwan create a better environment for birds. Few measures had greater impact than the imposition of United States trade sanctions on the island in 1994. According to Su Yung-ming, the law has been strictly enforced since the early 1990s. "Then, we spent a lot of time tearing down the bird nets that used to be strung all over the mountainous areas, but today you rarely see them," he says. Su notes that the snares were usually set by those who wanted to trap valuable racing pigeons and hold them to ransom, but such prey represented only part of the innocent bird population caught in the cruel nets.
Similarly, at one time it was common to see brown shrike kebabs on sale by rural roadsides in Pingtung County, espe cially in September, when the birds migrate over southern Taiwan in great numbers, but that practice also is now a thing of the past. Severe penalties for violation of the Wildlife Conservation Law of 1989 largely account for the change, particularly given that in 1994 the law was amended to provide for even heavier fines.
Today, cases of illegal bird-hunting are rare. "The biggest problem now is the threat posed by industrial development to wildlife breeding grounds and roosting areas," Wang Shou-ming says. "If we can only keep them intact, the bird population should grow." Unfortunately, however, Taiwan still lacks professional expertise in the planning and management of nature reserves--one reason why conservation budgets remain comparatively low and many nature reserves are left to fend for themselves, unpatrolled by law enforcement officials. Manpower shortages in the management field are also a problem. "If we could only find people with the talent to devise comprehensive projects for nature reserves, with accurate assessments of equipment and construction costs, perhaps budgets would be higher," Wang says.
Taiwan is rich in birdlife. According to the Chinese Wild Bird Federation, more than four hundred and fifty species are known to exist on the island, fourteen of them endemic species and over sixty of them endemic subspecies. This means that Taiwan, despite its small geographical area, is home to about 5 percent of the world's approximately 9,000 bird species. BirdLife International entrusted CWBF with the task of designating Taiwan's Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in accordance with internationally recognized criteria, and at a conference held last year no fewer than fifty-two of them were identified. "This list of IBAs can be used by the government and environmentalists in the struggle against industries that want to develop those areas," says CWBF's president Simon Liao
Last year's conference, "International Conservation of Important Bird Areas," is something in which Liao takes quiet pride. The event, held in Changhua, central Taiwan, was organized jointly by CWBF and BirdLife International, which now has more than a hundred organizations around the world affiliated to it, including CWBF under its alternative name of BirdLife Taiwan, which has been a member since 1994.
The conference, attended by twenty-nine representatives from twenty countries, including members of the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the head of the BirdLife Global Council, was a particularly satisfying achievement for Taiwan's bird conservationists because of the attention it attracted from the international community. Kuo Chen-yu, a former president of CWBF, says that this makes it difficult for the government to ignore the irresistible popular tide now running in favor of conservation. Such high-profile events afford foreigners an opportunity to witness Taiwan's efforts in the field while at the same time encouraging private enterprises like Cannon Taiwan to fund preservation programs as a means of enhancing their images.
To return to the beginning, what does the future hold for the black-billed spoonbill? Lin Pen-chu, a director of the Wild Bird Society of Tainan County, is renowned for his photographs of these beautiful birds. "We must respect them," he says. "They started to winter here perhaps even before Taiwan's indigenous people arrived." Simon Liao agrees. He does not oppose industrial development, but he does believe that if a place is the only suitable habitat for certain species of birds, then humans should back off. "We have to acknowledge that the island is home not only to human beings," he stresses. "And birds can tell us a lot about the state of our environment. If birds abandon a particular location, you'll find that one day it'll become unfit for human habitation."
Such sentiments are becoming increasingly widespread as conservation becomes a part of the island's culture, and the COA's Wang Shou-ming at least is optimistic about the future, particularly because, as he notes, "more and more people are going abroad to study wildlife preservation."
And as of July 2000, a representation of the Mikado pheasant, a species endemic to Taiwan that used to be listed as endangered but now is on the way back, will appear on the reverse of NT$1,000 bills. "I hope that future generations will be better educated about ecological protection," says Lin, whose organization has erected a bird-watching station beside the Tsengwen Estuary. "If someday I have to make electric-powered model spoonbills for children to look at, that'll be really sad. I hope that day will never come."