Last Murmurations of a Destroyed Wetland

Once, you could stand in the middle of the Saemangeum estuary at low tide and look out on a vast expanse of shimmering gray mud seemingly as boundless as the ocean itself, a landscape pockmarked with thousands of tiny volcanoes and home to diverse species of wildlife. All of that changed in 2006 when the South Korean government impounded the sea behind the world’s largest dike, the Saemangeum Seawall, enclosing the area where two rivers meet the Yellow Sea on the country’s southwestern coast.