Species Note
Auklets, Brünnich's Guillemot and Siberian Accentor in Korea
Records of northern seabirds and a Siberian passerine from the Korean peninsula: the kind of observation that fills in a distribution map.
A set of records reported through the Birds Korea blog, covering an auklet, Brünnich’s Guillemot Uria lomvia and Siberian Accentor Prunella montanella on the Korean peninsula.
Records of this kind rarely travel beyond a national reporting network, and they are the substance of what distribution maps are made of. A peninsula projecting into the seas between China, Russia and Japan sits where several distributions meet, and the birds that turn up there are frequently at the edge of a range that was mapped from somewhere else.
Auklets and Brünnich’s Guillemot are northern seabirds whose occurrence off Korea depends on winter conditions and on how far south cold water pushes in a given year. Siberian Accentor breeds in the taiga and winters, in variable numbers, considerably further south: a species that reaches western Europe only in occasional influx years and is far more regular closer to its breeding range.
The value of the observations is cumulative, not individual. One record establishes that a species occurs; a run of them across years establishes how often, when, and under what conditions, which is the information a range map is actually reporting.
Birds Korea maintains the record.