I'm so horny

Warning: if you're not into enjoying images of sexy species in the hand then skip this post.

This morning I joined Yotam and Itai from the IBRCE for an adventurous ringing session in the Uvda Valley, Eilat Mts. A good team that included Yosef, Ron, Meidad and poor Rafi & Avishai that don't have their own websites, assembled very early (I left home at 01:00 to arrive on site at 04:00). Check their respective websites for their stories and images.

We set the nets up in the freezing dark and finished right on time. At first it was very quiet but later on large numbers of seed-eaters started to arrive in the wadi. The main attraction was of course Temminck's Larks - about 80-100 birds in groups of 20-40. We caught 9 birds, each one more beautiful than the other. They are such fantastic birds in the hand - so elegant and pretty. Unfortunately, like all larks they don't behave well in the hand and look very sad. The males have these amazing horns - this guy had horns of 25 mm!

Temminck's Lark - male

Light conditions were bad this morning, with heavy clouds most of the time. In fact while folding the nets it was raining pretty hard on us.

Temminck's Lark - female

The wadi we worked in has tons of seeds on the ground. Amazingly, these seeds are still leftovers of the massive germination following the heavy rainfall of 18 January 2010! It was fun to watch these large mixed flocks of larks, Spanish Sparrows and Trumpeter Finches.

Regards from Hants

We also ringed five Bar-tailed Larks - another ringing tick for me, and very sweet little birds:

Bar-tailed Lark

We caught this young Mourning Wheatear of the nominate form. Note the rufous undertail coverts, limited black bib and extensive white on the primaries, excluding persica.

Mourning Wheatear Oenanthe l. lugens - 2cy

This was the brightest of all Trumpeter Finches we caught this morning:

Trumpeter Finch - 3cy+ male

That's the wadi we were working in:

Frozen ringers

Yosef

Other stuff in the area included some Spotted Sandgrouse flying around, and one Wild Ass.

Many thanks especially to Yotam and to all the rest of the team.