For post #2 of the day, I’ll make it short. I first want to give a shout out to the site Korea in the Clouds, where Alex (who I don’t know) is putting together some maps he has and, coupled with his experience, making his own maps of some national parks. He’s also giving trail descriptions, and has posted some maps of National Forests. Yay Alex!
I also don’t know much about IDing stuff, and I don’t have a field guide, but I’d like to know more… so I posted this on KOTR and thought I’d copy it here in case anyone different is reading and has anything to add. Here it is:
“Any wildlife/plant geeks out there? I’m looking for lists in English to try to identify stuff I see when I’m hiking. Birds are relatively covered by Wiki, but I’m having problems finding stuff about flowers and trees. I don’t tend to see many mammals, but when I do it’s generally just a chipmunk or squirrel and I’m not too worried about finding keys for them.
List of passerine birds of Korea
List of non-passerine birds of Korea
The Biological Research Information Center (BRIC) looks like it would have good info, but when you’re in the English language portion of the site and click over to the search, it switches to Korean – and my Korean isn’t good enough to figure it out.
Finally, I found links to Naver sites for birds, insects, and plants. They provide Korean and Latin names, and sometimes English names as well.
If anyone knows of any websites or field guides that would be helpful, English or otherwise, please share!”
Ooh! I just got a response back from Shawn. Here’s part of it:
“The most prominent field guide to flora is Beautiful Wildflowers in Korea. It’s published by the Korea Plant Conservation Society, provides taxonomical and botanical characteristics of the flora covered, has beautiful colour photos, and it’s all in Anglais. There is also a field guide to Korean birds available in English, but as you pointed out, the wiki is pretty good and accurate (even for a wiki). I highly recommend getting in touch with Birds Korea, if you haven’t already. The operator, Nial Moores, is a top shelf birder. He knows his stuff. They have tours and a lot of info on their site. www.birdskorea.org“
koreanadventure.wordpress.com 