Rare visitor to Taiwan

JINSHAN, Taiwan — The paparazzi gathered by the dozens, braving cold and rain and sticky heat. Sometimes their lanky quarry would lead them on long chases. Other times the celebrity would cooperate, particularly if crab or snail was on offer, drawing huge crowds to this farming hamlet on the northern coast of Taiwan after each sighting.

The subject of such adoration was not a teenage Mandopop star in hiding but a bird — a Siberian crane, one of fewer than 4,000 in the world and the only one ever seen on this Asian island on the edge of the tropics.

Environmentalists called him the little white crane of Jinshan, after the rural district where he spent most of his time, and his movements were tracked on Facebook and in the local news media. After he briefly ventured south over the mountains and took temporary refuge in the parking lot of a Taipei subway station, satellite trucks lined the country roads to monitor his return.

The local government hired a full-time bodyguard to look out for the crane, who faced threats from feral dogs and powerful typhoons. But the biggest problem was the sightseers.

“They were hard to control,” Chuang Kuo-liang, the bird’s guard, said. “They wanted to get close and touch him.”

I first encountered bird-watching in Taiwan when I lived in Taipei in 2014. Walk through any park in the city or bike the trails lining its rivers, and you will inevitably encounter a gaggle of bird-watchers with tripod-mounted cameras. They stand on muddy banks and circle around trees with nests, patiently waiting for a glimpse of a treasured creature.

Bird-watchers in Daan Forest Park in Taipei last week. The government hired a guard for the crane because of threats from feral dogs and overzealous sightseers wanting to touch it. CreditSean Marc Lee for The New York Times

“You have to wait, because you don’t know when it will return,” said Kao Twan-kao, a retired civil engineer who was watching the nest of a Taiwan barbet on a rainy afternoon in Taipei’s Daan Forest Park. “Sometime you will only see it once every few hours.”

The Taiwan barbet is known in Chinese as the “five-colored bird” for its green, red, yellow, blue and black plumage. One was waiting in the nest, a hole in a slender tree trunk, while its mate was out searching for food. We were lucky. After a few minutes, the brightly colored bird stuck its head out into the gloomy light of day.

“These birds are so cute,” said one bird-watcher, Chen Jia-hu, as he watched alongside his camera. “So we all want to protect them and protect the environment.”

Mr. Chen pulled out his phone to show me a Facebook feed of stunning images of birds that he had photographed around Taipei’s parks. Some, like the noisy and gregarious Taiwan blue magpie, are endemic to the island, meaning it is the only place they live and breed in the wild. Others like the Malayan night heron, which wobbles its neck while feeding on bugs and earthworms, can be found across much of Asia.

Several migratory birds, including the endangered black-faced spoonbill, spend winters on the island, too.

The Siberian crane was an anomaly. The bird was less than a year old when he arrived in December 2014, with cinnamon-brown feathers on his back and head. Later, as his adoring fans in Taiwan looked on, those colors gave way to pure white with black primary feathers.

Siberian cranes can live up to 80 years, but they are critically endangered. Fewer than 20 remain in western Siberia, migrating to Iran in the winters. A population in central Siberia that used to winter in India disappeared more than a decade ago.

The remaining cranes are in eastern Siberia and spend their winters in southeast China, downriver from the Three Gorges Dam at Poyang Lake, the country’s largest freshwater lake, which has experienced periods of extreme drought in recent years. The local environmental bureau has sometimes scattered corn to ensure that the birds have an adequate food supply.

“In the past there was always a balance, but now because of climate change, because of the man-made control of the water, cranes are facing a situation where they depend on humans to feed them to survive,” said Chiu Ming-yuan, the deputy executive director of the Taiwan Ecological Engineering Development Foundation. “And all the world’s Siberian cranes are in that one place. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

The Jinshan crane, though, was apparently blown off course while flying to Poyang with his parents, landing 400 miles to the southeast in Taiwan to the thrill of the island’s avid bird-watchers. He stands close to five feet tall, with long thin legs and wings that stretch more than seven feet. He would spend his days wading through the flooded fields, making plaintive honks as he searched for snails and fish.

Mr. Chiu, whose organization took up the cause of the bird’s protection, said that some 50,000 to 60,000 people made the journey to see him in Jinshan, which lies in a sliver of flatlands between the mountains of Yangmingshan National Park and the East China Sea.

“When this bird first came here, it not only attracted so many photographers, but also so many children who came with their school classes,” Mr. Chiu said. “And we began to think of what could we change in Taiwan, what could we change in the world.”

Local environmentalists seized on the crane’s visit to promote the preservation of wetlands. Mr. Chiu’s organization also persuaded farmers in the area to not use herbicides and pesticides on their crops to provide a better habitat for migratory birds. They also marketed the organic rice and lotus root produced here under the bird’s name, with a cartoon image of his red face on the package.

And Mr. Chiu said his foundation gave farmers a stipend to compensate them for all the lotus root seedlings the crane devoured.

A barbet in its nest in Daan Forest Park. Bird-watching is a popular pastime in Taiwan.CreditSean Marc Lee for The New York Times

Noah Strycker, a bird-watcher and writer who visited Taiwan last year as part of a world tour during which he says he spotted a record 6,042 bird species, said he had never seen such enthusiasm over fowl.

“I saw other attention-getting birds in 2015, including little penguins in Australia that drew hundreds of curious onlookers and a rare Golden Masked-Owl in New Guinea,” he said by email, “but the crane in Taiwan was the only one with its own 24-hour security guard.”

Mr. Strycker, who first visited Taiwan in 2003, said he had noticed a marked increase in interest in bird-watching on the island fueled by cheaper photographic equipment, more complete field guides and the growing availability of online resources for birders to share and communicate.

“On this visit, I saw dozens of people with huge cameras where I saw none in 2003,” he said. “The birds haven’t changed, but interest in them has skyrocketed in the past decade.”

In May, the Jinshan crane made a few trips along Taiwan’s northern coast, and then one day he was gone. Researchers say he probably flew across the Taiwan Strait to mainland China and then north to join his comrades in Siberia.

While farmers plan to continue refraining from using herbicides and pesticides, no one knows if the crane will return.

“If he wants to leave, we should support him,” said Huang Cheng-chun, one of the farmers whose rice paddies the crane called home. “I hope he has a smooth trip to see his family. I hope next year he comes back with a girlfriend.”