Biodiversity Diary a trip to Jeju Island — John MacKinnon

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B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

Jurassic Park

Waves crashing on rugged coast

Long-tailed blue butterfly

Squids hanging out to dry

Male blue rock thrush Seongsan Ilchulbong

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 for-ests, birds and wild roe deer – I was itching to es-cape. Jeju is the famous southernmost island of Ko-rea. It is a paradise for golfers and lovers, made fa-mous 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 vol-cano 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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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 ori-ental turtle doves, Brown-eared bulbuls, blue rock thrushes, grey and common night herons and occasionally a king-fisher.

Along the seashore, old ladies hunted for shell fish with primitive home-made snor-keling gear but dragging great bags of harvest back to sort and sell to the many seafood restaurants along the town front.

Biodiversity Diary

ECBP Newsletter Supplements Sept 16-21 2009

Asters on the rocks

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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 actu-ally 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

4 main agencies responsible for protected areas arrived together. It had been hard get-ting 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 ex-plored 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

B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

Basalt formations rising from the sea

Basalt formations along the coast

Columnar basalt

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B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

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 at-tracted a mass of late comas, painted ladies, small coppers and other butterflies. Shrikes

called and wagtails paraded along the dusty trails ahead.

We saw the wonderful basalt cliffs at Jung-mun 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.

View from Sunrise peak out to sea

The

entire

coastline

was so

clean

and fresh

Coastal Sedum flowers

Fledgling lark

Roe deer come out to feed in the evenings

White Clematis flowers Geraniums

Picturesque rocky bays

P A G E 6 Flowers bloomed among the cliff bluffs and the path ambled in and out of the forests where flycatchers and woodpeckers fed bus-ily. We climbed to the crater rim of Sunshine peak Seongsan Ilchulbong where a peregrine falcon glided through the sky and two os-preys 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. But the highlight of the whole trip was cer-tainly 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 ag-gressive magpies all attacking from different angles trying to get the fish away for them-selves. The osprey battled valiantly for 10 minutes before finally fed up with the mag-pie attack it carried the remains of the fish away to seek a more peaceful food perch.

Little egrets work the shallows

B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

Grey plover on the

beach

Grey plover finds a big worm

Brown-eared bulbul

Reef heron on the rocks

Of ospreys and thieving magpies P A G E 7 B I O D I V E R S I T Y D I A R Y

EU-China Biodiversity Programme Add: Rm. 503, Environmental Con-ventions Building No 5. Houyingfang Hutong, Xicheng District, Beijing. 100035, P.R. China Fax: (+8610) 8220 5421 Email: info@ecbp.cn