Eilat

On Wednesday I travelled down to Eilat for a short combo of work and birding. Arriving at Eilat in the early evening, it was a bit hot.

Seawatching was quite productive in the evening and in the early morning, despite the heat. I found an Arctic Tern, and saw Lesser Crested Tern and Long-tailed Skuager, all new to my year list. Arctic Tern is a good one, about annual in Israel. There was relatively good activity altogether, with three skua species, many commoner terns including White-cheeked, Cory's and Sooty Shearwaters (eBird checklists here and here). My photography efforts weren't very successful. I failed to photograph any of the rarities above.

White-cheeked Tern and 2cy Common Tern

Early morning White-eyed Gulls:

An early morning flyby of a tern flock demonstrated how tricky it is to separate Little Tern from Saunders's Tern in Israel. Note how large the black primary wedge is - four primaries at least; also rump and tail are concolorous with mantle (but too dark for Saunders's).

KM20 saltpans were very hot and quiet. There were hardly any migrant shorebirds. Kentish Plovers seemed to have had a good breeding season - they're on our Red List so this is good news.

Iris of IBRCE team and I picked up an exhausted/ill Caspian Tern. I drove it to the Wildlife Hospital near Tel Aviv - what an impressive beast. Hope it recovers.

Tern-mystery solved

On March 21st I photographed a Caspian-type Tern at North Beach. I was together with many other good birders, the bird flew by and we dismissed it as a caspian. I deleted all images from my memory card apart for this one which I uploaded that evening.
This bird set alarm bells off around the world, as it had a bright orange, pale-tipped bill, plus a few other features that could point towards Royal Tern - shape of black cap, overall paleness, bill shape.
I managed to recover the deleted images from my memory card (thanks Gal!), and the bird is a caspian after all. Note especially the extensive dark wingtips and short tail. It had my adrenalin pumping for a few hours but eventually we did not screw up a first for Israel as I was afraid (and hoping...).

On the way back from Eilat yesterday had a look at Uvda valley which was amazingly green. I had a few couples of Thick-billed Larks but they were all distant. Many Steppe Buzzards stopped there, going for insects:

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.