Tawu Mountain Nature Reserve: rugged, remote and wide open

Sometimes when I get on my rented scooter, I become stricken with indecision about where to go, despite having planned things out weeks in advance; looking at those high, forested, uninhabited mountains, there are just too many directions that I want to set off in.

This time, however, I stuck with the plan: Head south down Highway 11 towards Taimali (太麻里) township, enter the Taimali River Gorge, and from there access Tawu Mountain Nature Reserve (大武山自然保護區). More than 20 years ago, this preserve was set up after a year of studies between Taiwanese biologists and world-famous field biologists Alan Rabinowitz and George Schaller (who was the character 'GS' in Peter Matthiessen's book "The Snow Leopard").

The park was finally granted protected status when the aforementioned wildlife defenders met with former President Lee Tung-hui, who was enthusiastic about conserving an area that might still be home to the Formosan Clouded Leopard.

Black bears, leopard cats, flying squirrels, serow, muntjacs, macaques and snakes inhabit Tawu to this day. Formosan otters swam the rivers of the gorges of Tawu in the past, but they were wiped out for their beautiful pelts. The question which cannot be answered with certainty is whether or not the clouded leopard still hunts in the remote mountain forests of these valleys, devouring monkeys, pouncing on barking deer, and howling like phantoms in the night.

Definitive answers are hard to come by, and camera traps have produced shots of other mammals, but not the beautiful cat they were looking for. It should be noted, however, that even in areas where they are known to occur in relative abundance – such as Danum Valley in Sabah, Malaysia, and Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia - that these elusive cats are almost never captured on film, not even with motion-triggered cameras. I ask (ridiculously) almost every local in Taitung or Hualien (花蓮) I meet, in Chinese: “does Taiwan still have clouded leopards?” 95% of them answer an astounding “yes!” Thus, I return to Taitung again and again, hiking and river-tracing the gorges with a special feeling of enchantment knowing that maybe … just maybe, the yun-bow (雲 豹) still prowls the misty crags of this amazing county.

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