Dr Nial Moores, National Director of Birds Korea
Birdwatching and birding are growing rapidly in popularity here in the ROK, with now thousands of people enjoying birds every month. There are likely to be several reasons for this, beyond the obvious one that birding is a brilliant way to experience and better understand the world around us. Happily, we (as in Birds Korea) have played an important role in this growth of interest – through our fieldwork, education programs and online presence and more recently through our translation of the Merlin birdwatching app, and our role since 2019 in helping to build use of eBird in the ROK.
In only the first 10 months of this year, over 1,200 users in the ROK have already submitted more than 20,000 checklists to the eBird platform, generating a mass of count and distributional data. This compares to Birds Korea annual reviews in the 2000s, which had contributions from only 40 observers back in 2002 and 139 observers in 2010 – a tenth of the number of observers contributing to eBird now!
Our intention, of course, remains to help eBird grow further here in the ROK. For many users, eBird might be little more than a digital diary, an easy way to make and share checklists. Its real power, however, is in its scale and design, allowing evidence-based mapping of species across continents and over time the robust analysis of status and trends by anyone who wants to use the data.
Towards that end, Dr Ha Jungmoon and myself were invited by the Cornell lab (responsible for eBird, Merlin and the online Birds of the World) to represent the ROK at a two-day Asia regional eBird meeting held in Incheon on October 28th and 29th. In addition to four or five core staff from the Cornell Lab, this meeting was also attended by some genuinely inspirational representatives from India, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia – as well as two of our close colleagues from the Hanns Seidel Foundation (Korea office).
At our suggestion, this pioneering Asia regional meeting was then followed by our second ever domestic eBird meeting, with logistical support very kindly provided by the EAAFP Secretariat. This smaller meeting was attended formally by Ian Davies from the Cornell lab; four of the current volunteer reviewers (myself, Dr Ha Jungmoon, Leslie Hurteau and Gina Yi); three new team members – Song Heung-Min (from Tweet-Tweet in Ulsan), “Fran” Kim and Kwan Woochan; and Kim Eojin on zoom.
A range of issues were discussed – from the need for more translation support; more sound recordings, and annotations, to make the Merlin Sound App more useful; and the need for a stronger national team, to help review more quickly and to communicate more clearly about the platform and how we can use it to do the things we need it to do.
At least one specific event was also proposed during the Asian regional meeting which we sadly had no time to discuss at the national meeting: a “Bunting Count Week” (perhaps in February 2026) to fit in with a wider all-winter regional initiative across much of Asia being coordinated by the Hong Kong Birdwatching Society. This might provide an excellent opportunity to demonstrate just how important the ROK is for several bunting species – does anyone know of anywhere else with higher numbers of Rustic and Yellow-throated Buntings in winter than the ROK?
