Hacking at a bamboo plant with a machete, Avayi Vayayana peels back the shoot's stiff bark as he scans southern Taiwan's mountains, anxious for more of the money-making crop his Indigenous tribe increasingly struggles to find.
Generations of the Tsou tribe have lived off Alishan township's bamboo forests, which Vayayana says were planted by his forefathers and typically harvested in April and May.
But "the weather in the last few years has really been out of whack," the 62-year-old tribal chief says.