Today I returned together with Galshon for the ultimate visit to my Arava atlas box. It was actually a rather quiet morning - I am used to hear many more birds in the early morning. In fact before 07:00 we hardly heard or saw anything. I had great expectations as two weeks ago that region experienced huge rainfall and an impressive flash flood, but this late water supply was probably of no good and no annuals germinated. I was completely out of energy this morning and didn't get my camera out of the bag even once.
But eventually we managed to get pretty good results. First, we confirmed breeding of one of my Hoopoe Lark pairs - we had a male moving around with a fully-grown juvenile. Just like last year, I saw the male 'training' his son: he displayed and sang, and then his son followed him. This image is from last year but it looked very similar this morning. This represents very good news for this critically endangered species in Israel.
During the morning I thought I heard Dunn's Lark singing in the distance several times, and probably saw it once, but only in the late morning I managed to clinch the ID. But the bird was soon lost and I couldn't confirm it's breeding.On the way back we found a road-killed Wild Ass at Hameishar - possibly one of the animals I had last week. Sad.
There you go again Yoav talking about birds I've never heard of. Wonderful stuff.
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