Have been researching and photographing birds for over 40 years
The best birds experts are there.
BirdsInKorea.com is a tour company specializing in birding tours for international visitors and was in the top 10% of selectees in a tourism venture company contest sponsored by the Korea Tourism Organization in 2019. BirdsInKorea.com offers not only birding tours to the Korean peninsula but online information on its website including “Birds in Korea” and the “Bird of the Week” column, which, as its name implies, introduces a new bird every week. The aims of ‘BirdsInKorea.com’ are to provide information about the birds of the Korean peninsula to birdwatchers all over the world, to attract people interested in birds, and to assist people from other countries who are interested in the birds of Korea to visit Korea for a professional tour.
The birdwatching package provided by BirdsInKorea.com features Jung-hwa Seo, a leading bird expert who has studied and photographed birds for more than 40 years. Joo Eun Yi, who worked in the IT industry in Korea and the US as an electronic engineer, became deeply interested in birdwatching after meeting Mr. Seo. He is a licensed tourism interpreter and guide who obtained his guiding certificate and established BirdsInKorea.com in 2018.
The representative of wild bird expert and
ecological photographer in South Korea
Jung-hwa Seo is an expert on wild birds as well as an accomplished ecological photographer in South Korea. He has published ten books on birds, including A Birder’s Guide to Mountain Birds and A Birder’s Guide to Waterfowl. He is also an environmentalist who not only observes and studies birds, but works to preserve and maintain wildlife habitat. His interest and concern for birds began age eleven when he started to go birdwatching with his brothers. He later studied biology at university and worked as an ecological photographer at publishing company for four years after graduation. Since then he has been a freelance photographer who has amassed a large collection of nature photography. Over the course of his 30-year photographic career he has monitored various types of birds in a variety Korean bird habitats characteristic of the Korean peninsula, including the Han River Basin, the Nakdong and Geum Rivers, and Ganghwa Island. All the while he has been a staunch environmentalist who realized the importance of environmental preservation from an early age.
He gathered over 400 of the best photos taken during his career and assembled them into two field guides of Korean birdlife encompassing terrestrial birds and waterfowl. In addition, he has written eight popular children’s books on the wildlife of the Korean peninsula. And for decades he has been a consultant on various bird-related documentaries on major TV stations in South Korea in the role of advisor on habitat and ecology. In an effort to spread the culture of Korean birdwatching, he has spent years leading regular birding tours throughout the peninsula. The bird photos and descriptions from www.BirdsInKorea.com were all taken and written by Mr. Seo and we are very grateful to him both for his unwavering efforts at conservation and for sharing the valuable research and photographs he has collected in the course of his career.
Opened my eyes to the world of bird watching in 2016,
Soon, birdwatching became his biggest hobby.
After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees in Korea and the US respectively, Joo-Eun Yi worked as an electronic engineer at LG and Hyundai, and ran his own company for personal wireless communications in Korea and the United States. Joo-Eun was interested in nature and the environment in general, but had his eyes opened to the joys of birdwatching after meeting Jung-hwa Seo, the resident bird expert at the Wild Bird Education Center in Seoul, who has conducted bird-watching and monitoring activities in Namsan Park in Seoul since 2016. Birdwatching has been his biggest passion since then. He has explored not only Korea, but also southern California, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Disappointed at the lack of interest in bird-watching in Korea, he decided to do something about it and start a tour company focusing on introducing the birds of Korea.
He also noticed that there were few opportunities for international birdwatchers to experience the birdlife of the Korean peninsula and decided to found Birds In Korea with Mr. Seo. In 2019, he and Mr. Seo gathered Mr. Seo’s photos and knowledge of Korean birds collected over the course of 40 years of exploration of the Korean peninsula to create an introduction to Korean birds in both English and Korean at www.BirdsInKorea.com. He and Mr. Seo have developed professional bird tour packages for international birders to accommodate the increasing interest in the wildlife of the Korean peninsula. To this end, Joo-Eun acquired a professional tour guide license for international visitors and established the government-registered tour company, BirdsInKorea.com.
