Bats at Pinery Provincial Park
Hello, first-time poster here (and I imagine one of the only people on this site to be more into non-mammalian wildlife, though any mammalian bycatch is welcome).
Though I was born in and currently live in South Korea I lived in southern Ontario from early 2010 to mid-2022; a family tradition that existed mostly due to my insatiable interest in natural history was to go camping for 2-3 nights in one of the numerous provincial parks. In 2019 we chose Pinery Provincial Park as the destination. Like many provincial parks in Ontario, Pinery offers guided walks for large groups of visitors, and at least at the time these included night walks that involve (among other things) the use of bat detectors; during my visit I went out on my second night, and the walk picked up all 4 of the park’s usual resident bats (Little Brown Myotis, Hoary Bat, Eastern Red Bat, Big Brown Bat). Pinery is one of the last holdouts for Little Brown Myotis in Ontario and there are bat houses specifically for their use, though I didn’t check if they were occupied during my visit.
Bats aside, the night walk stops by a feeder that’s apparently reliable for Southern Flying Squirrel, but it had been taken over by Common Raccoons (the biggest ones I have seen) during the session I attended. Coyotes (the eastern population with minor Eastern Wolf admixture) were heard but not seen, presumably being disturbed by the large number of people involved.
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Speaker_for_the_lost
There are some fairly well-known birding sites in Korea (including wintering sites for 90% of the global Baikal Teal population, an urban Black-Faced Spoonbill breeding colony and a few regular wintering sites for Red-Crowned Crane and Steller’s Sea Eagle, all of which I have plans to visit). Mammal-wise though good luck, as my profile notes South Korea has one of the worst public attitudes towards mammalian wildlife in the entire world (to the point basically all the larger mammals have been extirpated or are close to it, with the exceptions of wild pig and water deer which are overpopulated due to a complete loss of all native large predators)
Baekryeongdo (island near North Korea, there is major military presence) has reliable sites for Spotted Seal as noted on the Korea page on this site. Haven’t been but I plan to at some point.
Raccoon Dog and Water Deer should be pretty easy to find via spotlighting, even in heavily disturbed areas (haven’t seen any raccoon dogs but they’re the most commonly recorded mammal on surveys; have seen water deer a few times including one adjacent to my old apartment).
There are a few places that are semi-reliable for Eurasian Otter, most notably Geumjeong District in Busan (in and around the Oncheon River)
There is a reintroduced (animals breeding in the wild for at least four generations now without feeding) Asian Black Bear population in Jirisan National Park and people occasionally run into them on the (extremely overcrowded) hiking trails, but it would be best to get in touch with the research team working with these animals. In spite of zero human injuries or deaths following the reintroduction (crop and livestock damage has happened, however, and problem bears are trapped), almost everyone here wants to see these bears be completely wiped out again because they think the bears will destroy Korean society by mauling and eating everyone (to the point misinformation about them being dedicated carnivores is rampant online), so don’t expect the bears to be present let alone potentially findable for long.
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Chad Johnson
Welcome to the site! Nice to get two bat location posts in a row to help me with my meager bat list. Don’t feel bad about liking non-mammals–I keep a list of everything, myself, including birds, herps, fish, insects, molluscs, crabs and, now that I have a microscope, microscopic life. I would love to hear if there are still good spots for wildlife spotting in South Korea, too.