Mt. Hermon ringing weekend

Spent the weekend ringing on Mt. Hermon. We did our annual monitoring effort at the large ponds near the lower cable station, and it was busier than ever. We had a good, large team that coped well with the huge numbers - we ringed over 1600 birds (!) over the weekend, and collected huge amounts of data. I hope to get the total figures later this week after all the data gets punched in. It was already evident that it was a good breeding season on the mountain, with large numbers of juveniles of all species. Linnets were the most dominant species, with higher numbers than ever. We had no great surprises, but caught most expected low- and mid-altitude specialties, some in relatively large numbers. I appologize for the few images - I was really busy the whole weekend. I also appologize for the dust on the sensor of my old 20D, I couldn't bother clearing all the particles out with photoshop...

Western Rock Nuthatch - juvenile Sombre Tit - adult

Syrian Serin - 2cy male

Woodlark - adult

As always, it was so much fun just watching the thousands of birds coming in to drink, enjoy all the Hermon specialties around, the weather and the scenery. I spent about one hour in bad light trying some field photography which was quite useless. I managed only these half-decent images:

Syrian Serin - juvenile

Syrian Serin - adult male

In the field we did not see too much interesting stuff. Only one Crimson-winged Finch came down to drink. A Grey Wagtail was a nice mid-summer surprise. Eyal had an adult Red-fronted Serin briefly, bastard.