Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Arabian birds, friendly birds

Yesterday I went down to Hazeva in the northern Arava. I met up with Ayla Rimon who's leading the new birding center launched there. I worked with her on her monitoring goals for this year - we checked some optional monitoring sites etc. First of all good luck to Ayla with the new position! 
At Hazeva in winter, birds are few and far between, so you need to make the best out of each bird there. The study group working there on Arabian Babblers for several decades now, led by Prof. Amotz Zahavi,  has accustomed babblers and other birds. This gives incredible opportunities to study them from very close, almost like ringing. Many of them are colour-ringed for individual identification.

Arabian Babbler 

Ayla the Babbler Princess

Blackstart

Note the fine spiderwebs on the thorns...

Arabian Warblers, the rarest and one of the most important species of the region, managed to evade us all morning. Only just before noon we bumped into a couple - but they were very mobile and moved on quickly before I managed to properly photograph them:

Arabian Warbler

No comments:

Post a Comment