Presenter: Mike Danzenbaker
In January 2018, Lee and I hired British expat local hard-core birder Nial Moores for a short (10-day) birding and bird photography trip to the northern half of South Korea. Even though it shares many birds with far better-known Japan, Korea features some rare and difficult birds which are nearly unknown outside of the region. Making this a customized trip allowed us to focus on rather specific goals, including Scaly-sided Merganser, Solitary Snipe, Long-billed Murrelet, and Hazel Grouse. Besides the difficulty of even knowing where to search for these very local birds, Korea would not have been an easy country to navigate on our own, especially not speaking a syllable of the language. The birding was challenging, not least due to the weather ranging from cold to severely cold, with frequent snow and infrequent sun. I had at some points considered a program simply titled "Bird photography in really cold places", in which Korea would have been a worthy component, but this trip ended up producing enough photo opportunities to warrant its own program. Hopefully this will be a welcome respite from the October Indian summer heatwave we sometimes get here.
