THE GEESE ARE ARRIVING!
This is the time of year when thousands of Siberian geese, like these in the photograph above and at the end of this post, arrive in our neighbourhood for the winter. Hundreds fly directly over our village, usually in tight ‘V’ formation, but sometimes in more eccentric patterns. Soon they will be familiar visitors to the fallow rice fields around our village,where they often gather in huge numbers. Later, I’ll do a post on that spectacle, with a video so you get an idea of the noise they make.
Vast numbers of Siberian geese, white-naped and red-crowned cranes, as well as much less numerous black vulture, use the DMZ area seasonally. Black-faced spoonbills and swan geese, live here year-round. The accessible surrounding areas have become a popular destination for ‘twitchers’ in search of the rare water-birds that find sanctuary in the paddy fields, along the Han River delta, and in the extensive grasslands. But also Angora goats, and even the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear, and just perhaps, the otherwise long ago vanished from the peninsula, Siberian tiger, live within the DMZ. In addition, rare species of flora, such as edelweiss, and previously undocumented species like a type of mushroom, have also been discovered there.
For beyond the embankments, revetments, bunkers, barbed-wire fences and look-out posts, out towards the great and forbidding unknown of North Korea, the DMZ looks uncannily primordial. This is because no humans, or almost none, can set foot there. Indeed, a myth that has grown up around the DMZ is that it is ecologically untouched and untouchable no-man’s-land, one within which nature escapes human control, and as a result thrives abundantly.
But the truth concerning the DMZ’s flora and fauna is actually more complicated. Although the two sides are meant to stay out, human actions are still a constant threat to wildlife and vegetation. Mines abound, for example, and are set off regularly by animals. The area has also been the victim of concentrated showers of deadly defoliants, such as Agent Orange. The result, so it seems, have been some unintended deviations within the eco-system, such as vast populations of acacia trees, which are restricted elsewhere in South Korea because they have a tendency to crowd out all other trees, or the creeping perennial hogweed, an invader from its more usual habitats which are North America and Manchuria.
Anyway, here’s some more sky-writing.
