Seeking Books for Naturalists
By Alex Johnson
Contributing Writer
Like to try some bird-watching, but don't know the birds? Want to know what kind of frog you saw on your last hike? Or what species of venomous snakes haunt Korea's woods? How about the names of the trees in your neighborhood?
When I first started exploring Korea's forests in the mid-1990s, there was little available in the way of nature guides. Now there's a bewildering array, on everything from amphibians to wildflowers. Here are some hints on choosing the book you need.
The Western notion of a field guide, a compact illustration-centered book aimed at quick comparison and diagnosis, hasn't really caught on here yet.
Most of the Korean guides, especially the older ones, are reference books, illustrated with photographs, one species per page.
Picture quality varies enormously: many of the older guides have at least a couple of photos that are out of focus, upside-down, sideways, mislabeled, or of an obviously dead animal positioned to look alive.
Thankfully, overall quality is much better in the newer guides. For many of the available books, you simply flip through the photos till you find one that matches what you saw or are looking at.
Think About Your Needs
What do you want to know? If it's only the name, that's easy ― in Korean. Western biologists see the scientific (Latin) name as a standardized link to all the information available on a species, but many Koreans prefer to use standardized Korean common names.
Some of the Korean guides do have scientific names, and a few even have English names. The text is usually in a set format, often with sections on appearance/characteristics, ecology/habitat/season, and distribution (within and/or outside of Korea).
Obviously, reading Korean will help; otherwise you might get help translating from your students or Korean friends. In my early days, I often assigned my students ``translation exercises'' ― which we all found interesting.
Some Guides Try To Do Too Much
Many groups of plants and animals ― trees/shrubs, wildflowers, mushrooms, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians ― are each well covered by a single guidebook. But if insects are your thing (as they are mine), don't expect one book to cover them all ― not even all the common ones.
Look for a guide that covers one large group only, such as butterflies, or beetles; even a guide that claims to cover both butterflies and moths will have too many omissions. Remember, the smaller the guide, the less complete it will be, unless it covers a group that contains relatively few species, like mammals or reptiles and amphibians.
If the book is too narrowly focused, it may not be very useful. Do you really want to buy one book for spring wildflowers, and another for summer? Or a series where volume one covers 100 randomly selected species, and volume two another 100? I prefer a single book with good coverage and organization, that's as compact as possible.
To identify a tree you may need to check the bark, the leaves, the flowers, the fruits, or any combination of these, so you need a book that shows you all of them. Do you really want a tree guide that only gives you one artsy shot of each species?
The older generation of guides was published by Academy Sojok, and while many suffered from the problems mentioned above, they were at least better than nothing, and for some groups its book is still the best or only one available.
Another early series was produced by Daewon-sa, which has a large number of thin paperbacks on many topics, including a few on nature, but these are mostly too brief to be very useful.
More recently, Kyohak-sa's Wonsek Dogam series has expanded to cover many groups of plants and animals. Like the academic books, these volumes come boxed, and their in-depth coverage and mostly excellent color printing make this the series to beat, even at 35,000 won or so per volume.
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Trees
: The best book on trees is Yun Ju-bok's ``Namu Shipge Chatgi'' (Easy Tree Finder), published by Jinsun at 36,000 won. It is illustrated and organized by flower color and season, with a picture guide to leaf types in front. The guy really can use a camera, unlike most of the other, obviously self-taught photographers, so the book is a pleasure to leaf through.
Wildflowers
: There are many flower guides to choose from, but I still prefer Kim Tae-jung's ``Hangukui Yasenghwa'' (Korean Wildflowers) published by Kyohak-sa. It covers most types of flowers, including those on trees. The photography is fairly good, but the text with scientific names is at the end, while the pictures are at the front, so you have to do some flipping back and forth, and the numbering can be a little confusing.
Mammals
: Korea's mammal fauna is not extensive, so the species really are adequately summarized in Daewon-sa's slim paperback ``Yaseng Dongmul'' (Wild Animals).It's a reference book, not a field guide, so there's no information on tracks, scats, skulls, or vocalizations, which is really too bad.
Birds
: The best bird guide in the modern sense is ``A Field Guide To the Birds Of Korea,'' by three Korean authors and illustrated by a Japanese artist.
It was published by LG Sangrok Jedan. With English and Latin names and indices, excellent maps, and more useful information on the endpapers, here's another well-done guide that's simply a pleasure to look through, even though the text is in Korean.
Seashore Life
: Remember that to look at seashore life you want to get there at low tide! For that you need a tide table, called a ``Muldehpyo.'' I like the ones put out yearly by Manuh Fishing Group. Each little pamphlet covers a couple of coastal cities, and each page gives one location's high and low tides for one month.
In the example shown, for Tongyoung in June, we see that the lowest low tide (Ganjo) of 4 centimeters will occur at 2:55 p.m. on June 4, a Wednesday.
The trick is to find low tides that fit with your schedule, like on a weekend. Note that most days have two low and two high tides (this is typical).
If you can't get a tide table, some fishing shops have the information condensed onto a little card with a diagram (but these are confusing); otherwise some calendars have tide information.
Maps
: There are maps available to suit every taste, but I'd like to put a word in for the 25,000-won Atlas of Korea, edited by five scholars and published by Sungji Munhwa of Seoul.
While not perfect, this book has been my planner and companion on more trips than I can remember, and not only for the very useful detailed maps of South Korea, at one centimeter equals 2.5 kilometers. There is lots more, including climate data, vegetation, land use, cultural features and history.
Alex Johnson can be contacted at kimht@pusan.ac.kr.