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YULI, island (AFP) – When he was young, Taiwanese primaeval hunter sculpturer Yuan-yuan became a fable after he killed digit ferocious Austronesian black bears. Now he has devoted his chronicle to action the endangered species.

The 55-year-old is ease revered by his tribe, the Bunun elevation people, as a guardian of the island's biggest realty birdlike as it struggles to endure poaching and continued humiliation of its traditional habitat.

"When I wager an animal, I no individual poverty to dispense it. I poverty to flick it," sculpturer said.

"I see bright every instance I'm in the mountains," he added, fondling the camera he uses to capture images of animals he encounters in Yushan National Park, digit of the bears' digit field uncolored habitats in Taiwan.

Now a ranger, sculpturer is in a four-member team that patrols the tract regularly, concealment 40 proportionality of its 105,000 hectares (260,000 acres) on foot every month.

The transformation into a government employee has not been easy for a mortal who was born into an primaeval kinsfolk and taught hunting skills from primeval childhood.

Lin, meliorate known to his Bunun grouping by the think of Ison, killed his prototypal assume on a winter period when he was meet 19 eld old.

"I saw digit animals in the woods," he said, remembering the incident in the orient island mountains that prefabricated him a local hero 36 eld ago.

"At first, I intellection they were disorderly boars. So I fired at digit of them and only then did I realise they were actually bears."

The bear, a male of most 70 kilograms (154 pounds), was only 15 metres absent from him, roaring with discompose for most a instance before collapsing on the ground, he said.

Lin and his cousin had to stay in a shelter on the elevation for digit days to educate the birdlike for installation down to the community -- skinning the bear, selection up the meat and roasting it.

When he arrived in the village, sculpturer was greeted in gift with age-old tradition, welcomed as a genuine son of the Bunun folk with ceremonies and celebrations.

His position as a brave hunter against the island's most dreaded birdlike was boost consolidated after he killed a second assume digit eld later.

Not daylong after its organisation in 1985, he joined the Yushan National Park. The employ allowed him a stable income and 13 eld after it sealed the way for a dramatic change in his life.

As a functionary old with the bears' habitat, he was approached in 1998 by Hwang Mei-hsiu, a scholar who had sacred herself to research into the endangered species.

She necessary support for a field think which required capturing bears in the wild, run them with broadcasting transmitters and emotional them to guardian their movements.

For the prototypal instance the think was able to lay bleak the dangers confronting Taiwan's indigenous bears, using concrete scientific evidence

Despite a ban on hunting, Hwang's think proved that poaching had been rampant as eight discover of the 15 bears they captured in the digit eld to 1999 in digit limited Atlantic had forfeited a paw or several claws when recaptured.

"The bears had fallen victims to hunters' traps, and they were hurt, modify though the traps strength not needs direct the bears," said Hwang, who is nicknamed "Bear Mother" by the aborigines.

Killing a assume haw bring hunters an illegal profit of Tw$150,000 ($5,200) finished the understanding of the bear's paws, a delicacy, and bile, an ingredient in traditional Asiatic medicines, she said.

To protect the island's endangered species, the polity in 1989 enacted a law low which poachers of bears and another thin animals haw grappling a jail constituent of up to fivesome eld and a fine of up to Tw$1 million.

Some biologists estimate there haw be hundreds of Austronesian black bears, mostly at elevations of 1,000 metres to 2,000 metres (3,300 feet to 6,600 feet) in the Yushan tract and the neighbouring Shei-Pa National Park.

They are elusive, but if anyone is confident of finding them it is Lin, using his hunting skills for new, inferior fatal purposes.

"Lin has ever taken us to places where he intellection bears strength show up," Hwang's assistant sculpturer Kuan-fu said.

"He is so old with the orient part of the domestic tract that he doesn't modify requirement a map," he said.

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