Welcome to the World of Birding — An Interview with Tamjo Chaekbang

Sometimes a world you never expected slips deep into your life and changes your everyday. For Park Imja, owner of Tamjo Chaekbang (Birding Bookstore), that world was birding. She began with an apartment birding club that watched birds around her apartment complex during the pandemic, and now runs Tamjo Chaekbang, a bookstore devoted to birding, sharing its joys through bird walks, birding trips and other cultural programs. We met her and slipped into the world of birding for a while.

Interviewee Park Imja, owner
Interviewer Ryu Sunwoo

We hear this is the only birding bookstore in Korea.
It opened in 2021 with the motto “Meet birds in the city.” The idea is that you don’t have to go out of your way to find nature—you can meet birds right where we live. When I started the apartment birding club in 2020, I realized how many birds there were in my own apartment complex, and that moved me deeply. I felt the club alone could only do so much to grow the number of people who go birding, so I decided to open the bookstore. I needed a space to run programs and projects where the general public could meet birds.

What did you feel when you first discovered birding?
At first I had no interest in birds at all, and I didn’t even know the word for birding. I simply wasn’t aware of birds. When I went to the mountains, I enjoyed the scenery with its flowers and trees, but I never paid particular attention to birdsong. And birding means listening to birds. The first call I ever noticed was that of a bird called the brown-eared bulbul. It chatters away almost all day until it goes to sleep, and it was a real shock to wonder how I had lived my whole life without knowing that sound. Once I started paying attention, I found there were so many birds around me. It was as if a bell rang in my head: until then, there had been no birds in my life. Running the bookstore, I feel as though I’m passing that experience on to other people.

Walking along Seohocheon Stream to the bookstore, we spotted many birds we had never seen before. You must have had a reason for choosing this location.
Tamjo Chaekbang originally operated at Gyeonggi Sangsang Campus. The rent there was really low, but you could only stay for up to three years. As we approached the three-year mark, I wanted to plan cultural programs aimed at growing the birding population. As I said earlier, the bookstore’s first goal was “meeting birds in the city,” and the second was bringing more people to birding. I believe anyone who tries birding can enjoy a much happier everyday life and will naturally come to care about the environment. We chose this spot because it’s close to a subway station, so it’s easy to reach, and because Seoho Park, one of the top 100 birding sites in Korea, is right in front of it. In fact, since the move, the share of visitors coming from Seoul has grown considerably. The space now plays a much bigger role as a serious birding hub. We keep the middle of the shop open so we can use it for classes and talks.

You also run a birding program called Saesanchaek.
Birding usually means watching birds through binoculars, but the Korean word for it, tamjo, still sounds a little unfamiliar. One of the reasons I named the shop Tamjo Chaekbang was the hope that people would get curious about the word and at least learn what it means. I wanted to lower the barrier to entry, but using tamjo for the program felt too technical, so I gave it an easy name: Saesanchaek, which means “bird walk.” In other countries, too, people often call it a bird walk.

What are some good birding spots in Suwon?
Until five or six years ago, birding was seen as a strongly seasonal activity. When migratory birds arrived in winter, people went somewhere to see cranes or somewhere else to see vultures. It felt like an event. Since I had brought birding into everyday life, I thought it should be possible all year round, so I chose four places for our bird walks. I left out the well-known birding sites. Ilwol Reservoir is easy to reach from Seoul, and in spring you can see a fun bird there, the great crested grebe, which dances and carries its chicks on its back. Next I chose Hwaseong Fortress, one of the city’s landmarks, and surprisingly there were so many birds. When I wondered why, I learned that King Jeongjo planted more trees than any other king in Korean history. Add to that Gyeonggi Sangsang Campus, once the site of Seoul National University’s College of Agriculture, and a small reservoir in Gwanggyo, and we kept up our bird walks for almost two years, visiting one place each week. We hold them less often now, but I’m still in touch with many people who have joined us since the early days.

We hear that besides Saesanchaek, you have planned and run other bird-related cultural programs.
We’ve run a huge variety of programs since 2021. Beyond birding itself, we draw birds, carve birds and knit birds, and we’ve created many occasions where ornithologists meet amateurs. When new books about birds come out, we’ve held book talks both online and offline. In the early days it was during the pandemic, so we held more events online than offline, and in a way that may be one of the reasons Tamjo Chaekbang became known nationwide.

So you have two identities: a birder and a cultural programmer.
If I had remained just a birder, I could never have planned any of this. In truth, I took a different path the moment I started apartment birding. Sometimes I feel like an activist. You could say I can bridge the amateur’s perspective and the expert’s. I have been completely obsessed with birding and I have also let it go entirely, so I know well what ordinary people are curious about. That helps me see which topics will create real synergy when I plan a talk.

You’ve also been running birding trips since 2023. How did those come about?
A great many children and families visit the bookstore. Some of the kids are especially keen on birding in their apartment complexes or putting up nest boxes, and a few of them even said they wanted to become ornithologists. So I thought, why not travel with the people they look up to? That’s how “Birding Trips with Future Ornithologists” began.

How was the birding trip to Suncheon, Gangjin and Haenam earlier this month?
Lee Wooman, who paints birds better than anyone in Korea, has an exhibition at a picture book library in Suncheon through April. That gave us the idea to invite him along, view the exhibition together and hear him talk about it. More than anything, what I remember most from this trip is the snow. (Laughs) On the first day we saw hooded cranes at Suncheon Bay, and from the next day, when we planned to see birds of prey, it snowed heavily. Even so, a steppe eagle—a really hard bird to spot—appeared and everyone went wild. Golden eagles and steppe eagles can only be seen there, so the trip ended on a real high. When I checked the photos later, everything was covered in snow and there wasn’t a single decent shot of a bird. Birding means meeting wild animals living in nature, so we go ahead in any weather. If it snows, you experience the snow; if it rains, you experience the rain. The only goal of the people on a birding trip is to see the birds they want to see. Not comfort or ease, but seeing as many birds as possible. Birding itself is the point of the trip.

Listening to you, Tamjo Chaekbang seems to be much more than a bookstore.
What a bookstore does is partly decided not by the bookseller but by the people who come. We follow what our visitors want. In a way, I think Tamjo Chaekbang in its earliest form was close to a place of healing. That may be partly because I used to work as a counselor. Birding can actually ease depression. I think the work of turning birding into a form of healing is only just beginning.

What are your plans for this year, and what future do you dream of?
Until now I’ve focused on the keyword birding, but I think it’s time to focus on the bookstore too. A bookstore has its own essential role, so I’d like to try things like reading groups. Personally, I want to concentrate more on writing. Since publishing a book, I’ve hardly written at all. I need some breathing room to do it, so I plan to cut back a little on our existing programs and write whenever I have time. And this year we will hold an exhibition of bird-related books at Hwadam Botanic Garden with the LG Evergreen Foundation, so that work will likely continue into next year.