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
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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: [email protected]
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