Week 28: Lunar New Year and the Baikal Teal

 

Flight of the Baikal Teal along Geumgang river on Feb 10, 2024

Because we had a 4-day weekend for Lunar New Year (Blue Dragon!) I planned a trip to Taeanhaean National Park with a colleague who is a birder. Dale Feiss is a biology teacher at SIS who arrived with me this year from the San Francisco Bay area. He has a fantastic camera and a lot of bird knowledge, but I am the one with the Korean driver's license, so we combined our assets and set out in a rental car on the morning of Feb 9th for the west coast of Korea. 

Dale was not sure where exactly we would encounter the Baikal Teal, but that is the duck he was interested in seeing. This duck lives in Siberia (on Lake Baikal) but it winters in Korea, and it is kind of late in the migration season already so we were not sure we were going to find this bird. But we figured that people in Taeanhaean National Park would know where to look. We drove from Seongnam (in Seoul, circled top left) to Seosan (near my middle finger in the photo) in about 4 hours. There was a lot of traffic on the 9th but it was a pretty smooth trip. At the forestry office in the National Park a young woman told us that we should check out a place called the Seosan Birdland, and that some of the Baikal Teal had been spotted in an area south of Seosan, on a river near Seocheon (circled in black near my index finger). 

Since it was already about 2:30 pm on Friday when we got this intel, we headed straight over to the Birdland and drove around some rice fields looking for flocks of migrating birds. We did not see the teal there, but we did see quite a few beautiful birds, and a mammal. 

Dale has generously shared his photos with me from this trip. I am including some here. I am posting a couple of them next to my photos. I have no doubt that you will be able to distinguish between his photos and mine (all of mine taken with an iPhone 13). 

 

As you can see, my still photos of the Ruddy Shelduck were all but useless compared to Dale's amazing shots. He really landed some beauties. Nimmi was consoling me by telling me that my photos have pretty sky and clouds in them too. But I realized after that first day that I needed to stick to videos while Dale took the still pictures. It made for a good combination. My video for this week is a bit longer than usual because of the abundance of bird footage I had available. 

Here is another combo of my Cinereous Vulture compared to Dale's. This was the one that really made it clear that I was outgunned. 😂

These are the largest vultures in the Old World. Found across Eurasia.  The wingspan is about 10 feet long and they weigh about 30 pounds. Standing on the ground they are about 4 feet tall. And that is how we first spotted these guys. There were three of these vultures in the field and they were on the ground munching on something. As we walked around near the rice fields we kept finding spines and bones. I am not sure what they could have been eating, but it was probably the hawks and falcons doing the hunting. We saw several hawks (and Dale has excellent binoculars so I could see them in detail). We did not get a good picture of a hawk though. 

We also saw storks. And lots of geese. And we saw a raccoon dog! He was cute and kind of curious about us. 

 

Dale's photos of the stork were amazing. This is the Oriental Stork and it is endangered. We obviously saw it building a nest. The Birdland had placed a tower in the field with a nesting stage at the top for the stork to use.  

 

More of Dale's photos of the Ruddy Shelduck and the raccoon dog. That raccoon dog was really cute but I was worried about hawks finding him. 

We headed back to where we were staying for the night after it started to get dark outside. We walked around a bit to find a restaurant that was open on Lunar New Year's Eve, and had an amazingly good dinner of hangover soup (haejang-guk). The meat was so tender it just fell off the bones. 

Saturday morning we were on the road by 7:30am to get to Seocheon. This is about 90 minutes from where we were staying, but this is where the forestry service people told us we would have the best chance of catching site of the Baikal Teal. We drove to a Migratory Bird Center along the Geumgang river just south of Seocheon. It was a frosty morning and the sky was hazy with a marine layer. When we arrived at the bird center it looked empty, and as it was Lunar New Year we were afraid it would be closed. But instead, it was free! Everything was open free of charge, and we were the only visitors in the place. 

 

These are my photos of the bird center (from the park along the river in front of it) and the Geumgang river in the morning light. 

What we learned at the center in Seocheon is that the Baikal Teal was still around! It was the tail end of the season for them but they could be spotted on the river a little east of where the bird center was between 5 and 6 pm. And by the time we had explored the migratory bird center it was 9:30am. 

We had a lot of time on our hands. We stopped for a morning beverage at a lovely little coffee shop in Napo called Napo Coffee. The woman who runs it has a fantastic garden and uses her plants to decorate the place. She had only had the shop open for about 2 months! I am going to make a separate post just about her place. I was enchanted by her little shop. 

We had a great lunch in a strip mall near a dam that crosses the Geumgang. We had kalguksu (noodle soup) and pork cutlet, and some really good mandu. We were in a restaurant that is really pretty big. When we got there we were the third party to have arrived but by the time we left there were over 100 other diners. We were the only Americans (as far as I could tell). I guess the wisdom of following the crowd to the best restaurant works even in small towns in west Korea. 

After lunch we crossed the dam (photo left below) and checked out the country on the opposite side of the river. There was supposed to be another birdland in Seocheon but we did not find it. This little drive turned out to be a key use of time later in the day though. The photo below right is my picture of ice on a post near the river when we arrived in the morning. It was a frosty cold world! 

 

We crossed back over to the south side of the river in the early afternoon and Dale took photos of a lot of birds near the dam and from a park that we found along the river. There were a huge number of birds on the water, often in small groups, but we could not find any Baikal Teal groups. We saw a lot of geese, gulls, mandarins, and grebes, and Dale also got some awesome photos of Cormorants, Tufted Ducks (with purple visible in their head feathers) and Common Pochards. Also some Common Shelducks and Black-tailed gulls. Dale's photos: 

 

 Black-tailed gull and Great Cormorant in flight. Common Pochard and Tufted Duck on the water. 

 

I have to emphasize that seeing the photos is actually better than seeing the birds in person. Even with the binoculars, it is not possible to see the level of detail and view the images without seeing blurred motion. I was very grateful to have an expert along who knew what we were seeing and how to capture it. 

At about 4pm we headed to a duck blind on the south side of the water that we had visited earlier that day. When we got there in the morning there had been no ducks on the water. But at 4pm we saw LOTS of ducks, in a great big huddle floating along together. Actually, we saw two of these bird-islands. 

That dark line in the water is actually about 200,000 ducks.

At 4:30, after walking along the south side of the river for awhile and struggling to see the ducks because they were so far to the north, we decided to hop into the car and retrace our earlier route to the north side. We knew we only had about 30 minutes before the birds would start to fly off together. They leave the water at sunset. But we had seen (through binoculars) that there was a walking path on the north side of the river and that it was much closer to the bird island. Here is what it looked like once we got to the right spot:

It is hard to believe that these are all ducks. And we did not really ever see one close enough to be able to identify the markings on them. But we knew it was the Baikal Teal by the way they swarmed together. We started to see them doing this: 

But the thing is, they did not just fly together in one direction. They circled and looped and made amazing patterns in the sky. You really have to see it in video. I must have taken 10 minutes of footage of the birds. And then, they started to fly right over us! That is how I got the top picture in this post. We felt droplets of water hitting us from their wings as they scattered over us and then looped back to the water. They made several false starts and then, by some unrecognized cue, they flew off into the gathering dark. Not one bird left on the water. 

I cannot describe how awesome it was. They don't quack, these birds, but in the video you can hear the thrumming of their wings beating together. It was spellbinding. Afterwards, Dale and I were hiking back to the car in the semi-darkness and just shaking our heads in disbelief. We had hoped to see a few stray ducks on the water. Instead, we saw a massive flock, and they did this performance that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing to see, and we were so close to them we could see individual birds. I am going to call it the Luck of the Blue Dragon since it happened on Lunar New Year's Day. 

We were so happy about seeing the Teal that we did not stop for dinner. On the 11th, we again got out early to catch morning at the mudflats in Taeanhaean National Park. This place does not disappoint. 

 

It was probably around 9 am when we got to the mudflats but sun had to burn through the marine layer, so we saw the light change a lot in the hour that we spent wandering around with the gulls and the sandpipers. The gulls would pick up clams and drop them from a height so as to break the shells open. We kept hearing the clams crack on the ground. There were also a number of people on the mudflats collecting the clams. 

We wandered along a pine forest that smelled lovely and had some cute black squirrels running around between the trees, and came to this visitor's center. It is a lot smaller than one you would find at a National Park in the USA, but still very welcoming. 

The sun had been able to brighten up the day considerably by then and we checked a map in the center. Dale picked a spot in the northern end of the park that he wanted to check out. This coincided with a location mentioned to me by our Environmental Science teacher colleague, Ally, architect of many of my adventures in Seoul. She had recommended seeing the sand dunes in this park. So we drove up to the top of the park and wandered the dunes. 

At the dunes we saw lots of grasses and textures. We also ate an amazing lunch. I had the best abalone kalguksu. The broth was incredibly tasty. And the banchan was by far the best I had ever eaten. 

 

There were so many textures and colors in the dunes. I suspect that it is covered with flowers in the spring and summer as well. 

 

Dale took a lot of pictures of gulls and sandpipers on the 11th. Some of his best shots are below.   

We had a four-hour drive (100 miles in four hours) to get back in time to return the rental car. It was a bit of a mad race. But we turned in the keys at 6pm (closing time) and made it home successfully. This was a great adventure! I am so glad we went and I will remember the flight of the Baikal Teal for the rest of my life. 

Link to this week's video: https://youtu.be/aAxwrlUcoBc

And, surprise ending...Dale actually DID get a photo of a Baikal Teal! Here it is. The two birds lower in the frame on the right are very likely the Baikal Teal. Thank you Dale Feiss!