Finally, here's that post about Northern Taiwan herping habitats for which I've been collecting pictures all spring and summer. About bloody time I got it online. Sorry about the shitey quality of some of the pix, those were taken with my little idiot cam when the DSLR was at the shop. (It's always the camera. Never the photographer.)
Yangmingshan National Park is a small mountain range (ca. 20 x 20 miles) on the North Coast of Taiwan, bordering the northern Taipei City limits. Its highest peaks rise up to about 3600 feet (1100 m) and are almost completely covered in subtropical forest. Our house sits at about 650 feet (200+m )altitude on the northwestern slope, right where the forest joins up with the agricultural plains stretching westward the remaining five miles of the way to the ocean. A very lucky location for any nature lover: out the backdoor I'm on the mountain in ten minutes, while the front door leads me to a plethora of lowland paddies, orchards, woodlands, ponds, and creeks. Here's a
satellite shot. YMSNP is the mountain range in the middle, and I live roughly between Cianshui Bay and the mountains.
Here are a few pix of what those lowlands have in store. Ever since "Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now" everyone knows what rice paddies look like, so there's no need for more than a perfunctory photo of this ubiquitous feature of the East Asian landscape.
A lesser known fact is that lotus plants (
Nelumbo nucifera) are not only pretty, but also have very tasty roots, so there's whole fields of those around here, too.
Banana plantations are also a rich source of herps. No, this patch hasn't been abandoned, the owner just doesn't want to fight the climate all the time - things grow over so fast here it would border on insanity to weed more than absolutely necessary. This is also the reason why we don't have meadows or grasslands that would lend themselves to the creation of board lines: our fastest growing grass is usually over six feet tall.
Didn't believe what I said about the grass? Yes, there's a trail in there.
Turning our eyes east, we're now traveling towards the Park proper, its mountains visible in the background.
In the summit areas, you'll be treated to vistas such as these. The little hamlet in the background in the first picture is Taipei, home to 6.4 million people, if you include the suburbs.
Let's hit the forest trails now. As you can see, flipping rocks is completely out of the question. Not that they're in short supply, but the jungle offers so many better hiding places for snakes that the only stuff you ever find under rocks are termites and scared skinks. It's truly a three-dimensional world that takes a lot of time to successfully explore, even if your ever-patient wife is helping.
Searching the jungle can be very frustrating, but the Universe is kind and just and gave us Asian herpers roadside ditches so we won't have to go too heavy on the Prozac. Mmmmhhh....diiiitcheeees - now there's a snake-a-minute world if it's your lucky day. As in most of Asia, 90% of the ubiquitous, narrow roadside gullies lining most of the Taiwanese country roads (due to the rainy climate) are not covered, and their bottoms are usually strewn with leaf litter. This combination provides a false sense of safety for many small animals, and makes for nice habitats for plenty of fossorial invertebrates, for the lizards and frogs who eat them, and for the snakes who eat those. Plus, the drainage pipes inside the anti-landslide walls along the gullies are home to oodles of herps. To find all these animals, you walk inside the ditches, kicking up the leaves as you go. (At night, however, it's advisable to walk along outside and stir the leaves with some long utensil, because after dark the trenches literally crawl with venomous snakes.) If the ditches actually carry water, even better: lots of frog-hunting snakes hanging out along the sides.
In the Chinese world, graveyards are also highly productive herping grounds. As I wrote
elsewhere, "the Chinese like their burial plots to look like mini-mausoleums, so there are tons of bricks and stones for reptiles and insects to bask on and hide under. As a rule, traditional Chinese all over the world don't like to visit graves, a side effect of their often quite strong superstitions. They clean and weed them once a year - on Tomb Sweeping Day, a traditional national holiday religiously observed all over the Chinese world - and then let Ma Nature do her thing again for the next 364 days. In tropical climes this quickly leads to wild bushland spotted with occasional tombstones poking out from the shrubbery."
Whenever I get bored with the National Park and the lowlands, I drive sixty miles south into the promontories of the Central Mountain Range and roadcruise the Northern Cross-Island Highway. This is a narrow, winding, and rockslide-prone little road that traverses the island from West to East, and it sports a little stretch of just 15 miles that leads through dense forest at an altitude of about 600 meters (2000 feet). This stretch is neither inhabited by humans nor agriculturally used, and it's by far the best cruising road in all of Taiwan, yielding up to twenty different snake species on a good night. One reason for this, apart for the pristine wilderness, is that the road cuts through a few 6500-foot mountains full of montane species which occasionally come down to lower elevations. Another reason is that the area sits just inside the northernmost extension of quite a few southern species, such as the Hundred-Pacer (
Deinagkistrodon acutus).
Here are some views from the B&B we always stay at down there.....
Last, but not least, a little oddity: this area is mostly inhabited by the Atayal tribe, Taiwanese aborigines that are closely related to Pacific islanders and have culturally almost nothing in common with the Han (Chinese) majority here. These guys have lived and hunted in the mountains since they immigrated from the Malay Archipelago thousands of years ago, and they like to eat a variety of raw meat, such as the innards of flying squirrels they shoot with ingenious crossbows and disembowel on the spot. (They only eat the guts and toss out the rest of the rodents.) This mural by the Cross-Island Highway warns of the various diseases that can accompany such a snack, what with the various internal and external parasites that plague wild animals.
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