COVER N. 223 - SOUTH KOREA

Postmark: Gwanghwamun - Korea 07.02.23  

Posted on the 7th February; Received on the 14th March 2023

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And so the list keeps growing.... the lyrics of an old Pete Seeger song come to mind, even if applied to a totally different context: "inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow..."

Welcome to my philatelic garden, the Republic of Korea, and thanks a great lot, Park, for helping me tick another box.

Coleoptera and Lepidoptera rank in the top 3 of my insect loving scale, the other place being occupied by Odonata (damsel and dragonflies), so I was quite elated to see the stamps were used on this first Korean cover for my collection, 

The two 110Won  stamps, in fact, constitute a set issued on 07MAR1994, and as far as I could perceive this was the first iteration of annual two stamp series  dedicated to the protection of wildlife and plants, that ran until 1997.

The butterfly stamp depicts a Japanese emperor (Sasakia charonda), a member of the Nymphalidae family, distributed across Japan, the Korean Peninsula, China, northern Taiwan and northern Vietnam. 

The coleopter stamp is illustrated with a Japanese Rhinoceros Beetle (Allomyrina dichotoma), a member of the Scarabaeidae, distributed, according to wikipedia, along  Japan (Honshu, Kyūshū and other islands including Okinawa), Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and eastern China.  Rhinoceros beetles feed on sap and fruit while their enormous larvae feed on rotten wood.

Just for comparison here's a couple of pictures of the European counterpart (Oryctes nasicornis) - imago and larva -  that I took in the centre south of my own country.