Biodiversity Diary a trip to Jeju Island — John MacKinnon
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Squids hanging out to dry
Waves crashing on rugged coast
Long-tailed blue butterfly
Seongsan Ilchulbong
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Jurassic Park
Male blue rock thrush
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The land of wind, rocks and women John MacKinnon Trapped in a boring hotel for 4 days of meetings on CBD protected areas progress whilst all beyond the town of Jeju is a beautiful island of coasts and forests, birds and wild roe deer – I was itching to escape. Jeju is the famous southernmost island of Korea. It is a paradise for golfers and lovers, made famous by TV soap operas and intense promotion. Before that it was famous for wind, women and rocks. Wind because of its exposed position facing the great Pacific Ocean, rocks because it is a volcano and covered in a debris of pumice boulders and women because so many fishermen in olden days were killed in the rough seas that there was
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Biodiversity Diary ECBP Newsletter Supplements Sept 16-21 2009
always an excess of females on the island. Rocks were certainly part of the scenery, collected and arranged as walls around the fields, as house construction, grave sites and as sacred Bangsatap towers erected to promote harmony, peace and prosperity. My only chance of escape was to dash out early each morning up a narrow creek park that fed through the town from the sea. In overhanging trees there were oriental turtle doves, Brown-eared bulbuls, blue rock thrushes, grey and common night herons and occasionally a kingfisher.
Asters on the rocks
Along the seashore, old ladies hunted for shell fish with primitive home-made snorkeling gear but dragging great bags of harvest back to sort and sell to the many seafood restaurants along the town front.
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Birds of the shoreline The sea looked cold but as I was to find one night when I went for a swim after a slightly drunk birthday party it was actually warm and clean I wish I had ventured into the sea earlier. Of the meetings themselves, the highlight was certainly when team China arrived a day late but eager young officers from the
Basalt formations rising from the sea
Basalt formations along the coast
Columnar basalt
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4 main agencies responsible for protected areas arrived together. It had been hard getting each agency to send a delegate and there were further problems with the flight schedules from Beijing. I was relieved when they finally got reached Jeju and even more delighted when they seemed to shed the stuffiness and turf competition that has dogged collaboration on protected areas for years in China and smilingly agreed to pool and share data, report as one and generally push the CBD agenda on protected areas forward. On our last day in Jeju we had the chance of a field trip around the island. I had explored the great volcano of World heritage Site Mt Halla and the underground larva tunnels of Ssangyong on a previous visit to the island, so had already enjoyed the inland fauna—the roe deer and pheasants
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Geraniums
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White Clematis flowers
The
Fledgling lark
entire coastline was so clean and fresh Picturesque rocky bays Coastal Sedum flowers
Now I was equally happy to tread the coast, visit some old villages and also see the new conference centre being considered for the next IUCN general assembly. Fields of daisies attracted a mass of late comas, painted ladies, small coppers and other butterflies. Shrikes
View from Sunrise peak out to sea
called and wagtails paraded along the dusty trails ahead.
Roe deer come out to feed in the evenings
We saw the wonderful basalt cliffs at Jungmun Daepo . Waves crashed in a great spray along the black rocky shore. An old lady offered fresh raw seafood from a tiny stall. Reef herons and rock thrushes dash among the spray to collect crustaceans.
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Flowers bloomed among the cliff bluffs and the path ambled in and out of the forests where flycatchers and woodpeckers fed busily. We climbed to the crater rim of Sunshine peak Seongsan Ilchulbong where a peregrine falcon glided through the sky and two ospreys were busy fishing in the bay below. Grey plovers attacked huge lugworms in the sand and local fishermen hung out lines of freshly caught squids to dry like washing on long clothes lines.
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Grey plover on the
But the highlight of the whole trip was certainly an osprey perched in a pine tree below the cliff-top footpath trying to eat a large fish but constantly harried by a flock of five aggressive magpies all attacking from different angles trying to get the fish away for themselves. The osprey battled valiantly for 10 minutes before finally fed up with the magpie attack it carried the remains of the fish away to seek a more peaceful food perch.
beach
Little egrets work the shallows
Brown-eared bulbul
Reef heron on the rocks
Grey plover finds a big worm
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Of ospreys and thieving magpies
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EU-China Biodiversity Programme Add: Rm. 503, Environmental Conventions Building No 5. Houyingfang Hutong, Xicheng District, Beijing. 100035, P.R. China Fax: (+8610) 8220 5421 Email: info@ecbp.cn