Festival update - day 4

I had a rather relaxed day today. In the morning I led a half-day tour. We began at the IBRCE which is always fun to visit. The ringing team had just caught a Short-eared Owl - what a fantastic bird! I missed adding it to my ringing list by just a few minutes...

Other good birds around were a couple of flyover Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters, and the long-staying Red-necked Phalarope. After that we climbed up to the Eilat mountains where we had massive raptor migration, with several thousand Steppe Buzzards making up most of the traffic. We were joined by Dick Forsman and together we had a good ID workshop, with most expected species observed. Three Little Swifts were nice to see migrating among the raptors.

In the afternnon I spent some time at North Beach, which was rather slow. We had several White-eyed Gulls fly west to roost, four Common Tern and one Caspian Tern showing well.