Gimpo then and now

My original picture from 2005

Google street view 2015

Google street view 2018

My original picture from 2005

Google street view 2015

Google street view 2018

  Plus ça change, plus ça change. Things happen fast in Korea (Bballi bballi!). I mentioned a few years ago that when I returned to Gimpo in 2018/19, the landscape, both urban and rural, was no longer recognizable as the place I lived in 2005-2006. Not a single thing was in its place anymore.

  One of my favourite walks during my first year in Korea was a narrow country road that wended its way around the contours of a valley. The valley had been used for farming for generations. There were old (100 years old at least) farmhouses settling into the landscape, and moss-covered grave markers on every hill. I had many early birding firsts in this valley of the morning calm. It’s the place I identified, with my Cracker Jack binoculars and fresh “Birds of Korea” field guide, my first Brown-eared Bulbul, Vinous-throated Parrotbill, Black-naped Oriole, and Oriental Dollarbird, among many other common Korean birds.

  I walked the old back road that connected Gimpo and Incheon many times, as it was the quickest way (30 minute walk) to get to and from a friend’s place. I randomly tried to walk the same road using Google Maps the other day, and was surprised, yet not surprised at all, to discover big changes had occurred since 2005. The only two years available on street view were 2015 and 2018. In 2015, there was evidence of massive clearances along the road, with farmhouses and plots being ploughed under, and many of the ancillary buildings along the road being demolished.

  By 2018, everything was gone, and most of it had weeded over in an alarming hurry, as if people had never lived there at all. If that’s where it ended, I’d be cool with it. A quiet valley being restored to nature, roll credits. But I know that’s not what’s going on there. I’m confident that huge new complexes of domino apartments will be constructed there, if they haven't been already. New NDG-sized neighbourhoods being birthed in five short years. Rural being roughly transitioned into urban.

  You can see a hill in the background stripped of trees. This often precedes the actually demolishing of the hill itself – after the trees have been cut and sold, cranes will come and tear the hill down to ground level. I saw it happening in the hills of Suncheon, where they built my whole neighbourhood over a filled-in swamp (Funny side story – the parking lot outside my apartment sank by a foot one day, leaving a corresponding dip in the road. What did the apartment developers do about this worrying structural failure? They painted the dip like a speed bump, as if they’d planned it all along. Well played...). When they ran out of swampland, they levelled a valley, and up went the apartments. I saw the same process in Gangneung – in the six short months I was there, three hills in my neighbourhood were levelled, one of them to expand a grocery store’s parking lot. We’re talking the entire hill – trees felled, dirt and rock picked up and carried off, one dump truck at a time.

  The destruction of habitat in Korea was the most upsetting part of being a birder there. I always grimly joke that if you find a nice quiet birding patch somewhere in Korea, be sure to take a ‘before’ picture, to compare to the inevitable habitat destruction that will surely take place there in short order.

  I wonder if they’ll bulldoze the cemetery hills in Gimpo too, or if the slumbering dead are the only ones immune to ‘progress.’ Stay tuned!

  Anyway, those are my rambling ruminations on a windy winter afternoon. I've been having Verditer Flycatcher daydreams these days.