Bird news from Dr. Bernhard Seliger and Dr. Hyun-Ah Choi (Hanns Seidel Foundation Korea and Birds Korea) together with Isabelle Winter
In April, migrants like Intermediate and Little Egrets, Cattle Egrets and Barn Swallows returned to the Yudo and Siam wetland areas, together with small migrants like Stejneger’s Stonechats. But the most pleasure of a day in the area was to see how the munon in Bogugot-ri filled up with migrants. The fields had been flooded since early this year, but until March the number of birds and bird species they supported were rather small.
We reported before of the rice fields which had been flooded from early this year, called Munon in Korean. This time, we counted there 9 Black-faced Spoonbills, 37 Ruddy Shelducks, plus Mandarin ducks, Falcated ducks, Northern Shovelers, Mallards, Gadwalls, Teals, Eurasian Wigeons, Northern Pintails, and almost 340 Spot-billed ducks,
On Yudo itself, island in the Han Estuary, we counted at least 720 nests of Great Cormorant, seemingly all busy, plus probably around 30 nests of Great Egret and 25 or more of Grey Heron. No Black-faced Spoonbills were seen on the island, but given that they fed very close to the islands in the flooded rice fields, it is very likely that they also breed on the island.
In May, we look forward for more species returning – no Chinese Pond herons yet…
