Changing Seasons – July 2026

Hello hello friends. Here in Seoul, changma, the monsoon season seems to be over, heralding the start of true summer heat. Next week the forecast shows highs of up to 37 degrees celsisus. Whew, wish me (and my wee AC unit) luck.

Looking back through my photos, July was a pretty full month of hobbies, both indoor and outdoor. First up:

Birds

After a break from birding in June, I got to attend two birding meetups in Seoul this month. The first was at Changgyeonggung Palace, and the experienced birders were very helpful in pointing out the invisible-to-me birds in the trees and sharing their binoculars with us newbies. I don’t have a lot of great photos from this day, but this cute Mallard baby was a highlight for sure.

The second outing was at Namsan mountain. It’s been years since I’ve been to Namsan, and I think the first time I’ve hiked down the mountain.

The mountainside in summer, with its lush foliage, isn’t the best time and place to see birds, but the veteran birders still spotted a fair showing. I observed a Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker for a while (alas the photo is too blurry to share). And later we watched this Brown-eared bulbul seemingly play with its food, but it turned out it was taking the insect to its kids up in the trees. I wasn’t able to get a photo, but the young’ns were definitely fluffier looking than the adults.

Towards the end of the trail we saw Common pheasants! The female ran by quickly and disappeared, but the two males strutted around each other for awhile. As you can see, one had its long tail feathers, and the other did not. We wondered if the tail-less one was a juvenile.

A gorgeous fuchsia moment with lotus flowers under a Crepe-myrtle at this man-made pond.

Other summer creatures: a tree frog, a Black-spotted pond frog, a rhino beetle, and a Scarlet skimmer.

I remember when I first started taking an interest in birding, I thought this would be a hobby I could do without spending any money. Just walk around nature and look for birds, right? And of course that’s very possible, but after seeing the world through expensive binoculars, and the photos that are possible with cameras attached to canon-like lenses, one can’t help but want to upgrade. As of now, I want to see if I stick with birding consistently for a year before I consider getting better binoculars.

Fiber arts makes

I attended two workshops co-hosted by Atelier Zaneedle and the British Council, as part of an exhibition on sustainable fashion. At the first workshop, I appliqued a daffodil with scrap fabrics onto an upcycled denim flower vase cover. And then at the second, I properly learned how to darn with a weaving technique. You may remember I tried my hand at visible mending before, and while I’m still very proud of my first attempts, I’m happy to have learned a more structured way to do it.

In July, the summer-fall semester of crochet class started up again. Our first project was a small tray for knick-knacks. We made the brown-green one in class with a cotton-acrylic yarn, and I made a second with the leftover Mochila blue yarn from last semester’s bottle bag.

These pictures sum up my hobbies past and present pretty well. I worked on my second summer hat and finished my first granny square as I watched Formula 1. Yay for Lando winning his first race this season.

And now I’m just about to finish up this drawstring-type water bottle bag.

The tricky thing with multiple hobbies is there’s just not enough time to do them all. As I’ve leaned into crochet this year, I’ve definitely seen a drop in drawing time. I hope next month I can squeeze in a few quick drawing sessions, because I do miss having drawn records of my life. And I think keeping a birding journal will help me retain the information I find myself looking up over and over. (For example, the difference between a Marsh Tit and a Cinereous Tit)

I hope you are enjoying your July and looking forward to August! This post was written as part of the Changing Seasons challenge. You can visit Ju-Lyn’s post to see how other creatives around the world spent their month.