In 2025, Birds Korea and Birds Korea Yeoncheon have continued to conduct analysis on biodiversity (and particularly on birds) for Yeoncheon County – serving to to determine conservation priorities and ecotourism prospects inside the Biosphere Reserve, together with figuring out areas which must be thought-about for inclusion in a doable Yeoncheon Imjin River Ramsar web site as beforehand raised by the Mayor.
As a part of this, a significant focus in 2025 has been attempting to enhance understanding of the distribution and ecological necessities of the nationally threatened Lengthy-billed Plover 흰목물떼새. That is an especially difficult species to survey effectively!
This explicit mid-November survey was designed to run alongside common monitoring of cranes and repeat counts of Scaly-sided Mergansers 호사비오리 alongside key stretches of the Imjin river (with this latter effort by Baek Seung-Kwang supported in October-November by an EAAFP Small grant fortunately discovering a November day peak of 101 Scalies…), and as earlier than included all three of the principle streams / rivers in Yeoncheon/ the Biosphere Reserve: the Imjin, Hantan and Chatancheon.
In complete, we (Baek Seung-Kwang, myself and on two of the dates, Kim Haemin) positioned 55 particular person Lengthy-billed Plover at a complete of ten places, with the biggest concentrations at Horogoru (17) and within the proposed Jeongok Wetlands park (15). Primarily based on behaviour and nonetheless poorly understood plumage variation, and within the absence of marked birds, it’s tempting to counsel that almost all of those people possible had been the identical as these discovered throughout our Lengthy-billed Plover surveys in spring and summer time, when 59 and 28 respectively had been discovered alongside the identical three rivers. What number of of those will stay by means of the winter? And in the event that they depart Yeoncheon, the place will they spend the winter?
Along with Lengthy-billed Plover, we discovered an additional 88 or so chicken species; proof of a number of mammals (together with what look like River Otter tracks at a number of places) and a Nationally Threatened Brown Hairstreak Butterfly Thecla betulae.
Additional observations of word throughout the identical interval included Yeoncheon’s first confirmed file of Black-faced Spoonbill 저어새 (photographed by Lee Su-Younger and Jang Ryang within the Peace Rice-fields on November 15th) – actually outstanding to this point inland, in freshwater and on such a later date; over a thousand White-naped Crane, 4 Hooded Crane and a single grownup Widespread Crane; respectable numbers of raptors (together with a number of White-tailed Eagles, and single Osprey and Merlin); observations of Hill Pigeon in two new, further areas; Gray-capped Pygmy Woodpecker at a brand new location; and – utterly in contrast to final winter – good numbers of winter landbirds, together with Siberian Accentors, Lengthy-tailed Rosefinches, Pallas’s Rosefinches and Eurasian Bullfinches.
