Mystery tern at Ma'agan Michael

Yesterday (29/6/10) early morning Yosef Kiat, Yotam Lenhardt, Ohad hatsofe and Asaf Mayrose ringed this interesting tern at Ma'agan Michael, among the Common Terns breeding there. Yosef passed the images and biometrics to me (thanks Yosef!) and I will be happy to get some expert opinion on it, as I am quite puzzled by this bird. Plumage-wise, it shows all the important characters for White-cheeked Tern - dark grey belly and breast contrasting to white cheeks, dark grey upperparts and most important - grey rump, uppertail coverts and tail.






However, size and structure are not good for White-cheeked Tern, and are in fact closer to Common Tern. In this table you can see the biometrics of the mystery tern compared to the Common Terns ringed there yesterday:

I would expect White-cheeked Tern to be significantly smaller with darker bill, and darker and shorter lags. This bird is quite close to the average Common Tern in size and structure. I am aware of the huge variation demonstrated by Common Terns both in plumage and structure, but I have never seen nor managed to find info about such dark birds, nor did I find anything about hybrids of these two species.
It is worth noting that White-cheeked Tern is a scarce summer non-breeding visitor to Eilat, but extremely rare on the Mediterranean coast. During the last 4-5 summers one 'White-cheeked Tern' has oversummered at Ma'agan Michael among the breeding Common Terns (I've seen that bird several times). This bird ringed makes me wonder whether we missed something all of these years.
So, if anyone has interesing info or ideas about this bird, please drop me a line - as a comment here or by email. Thanks!

Rare larks in mid-summer !?!?!

This morning I visited one of the most productive atlas boxes in the Arava together with Jonathan. We went there with very careful optimism, as we assumed that all breeding larks will have dispersed by now. But in fact we were surprized by the terrific lark activity. Most species were still feeding young of their third breeding cycles - quite amazing for the normally hyper-arid Arava. We had good conditions - bearable temperatures and no wind.
I must admit that most birds were in quite ugly plumage - either juveniles in post-juvenile moult, or adults in post-breeding moult.

Best larks of the morning were Thick-billed Larks - we had at least one pair; the female was flying around with food, so I guess it had juveniles waiting for it somewhere in the adjacent hills. I did not manage to get any images of them unfortunately. This is REALLY late for these extreme nomads.

We had two or three Hoopoe Larks. We got good views of a female feeding a juvenile, and another flying bird which might have been a third individual. This is the female, looking for insects in small bushes. Not very attractive, is it?

Hoopoe Lark

We had a very mobile group of six juvenile Temminck's Larks. To my best knowledge they did not breed there, rather somewhere higher up in the Negev. All I managed to get out of them were these poor record shots.

Temminck's Lark - juvenile

The commonest bird present was Bar-tailed Lark. We had over 30 individuals, most were juveniles moving around in small groups. This must have been a super breeding season for this scarce species.

Bar-tailed Lark

Some of the juveniles were very inquisitive and walked right up past the close-focus distance of my lens:

We had also one male Desert Wheatear - again an ugly moulting bird.

Desert Wheatear

I had no Dunn's Larks this time but Jonathan had three possible birds moving about. Other good birds were 2 Crowned and 2 Spotted Sandgrouse, and on the way out two families of Hooded Wheatears.

Hobby

This morning had some time to check the Ashdod ponds. There was an increase in sandpipers since my last visit: 10 Redshank, 13 Green, 4 Wood, 1 Marsh and 1 Common Sandpipers. This adult Hobby flew in and spooked everything. It was distant (across the pond - about 100 m away) so these are large crops.

Nightjar action!

Yesterday I completed my Nubian Nightjar monitoring for the season. I found activity and indications for breeding success in most territories I'm familiar with, though since last year two territories (out of a national total of 20!) have been destroyed and had no nightjar activity.
I drove down in the afternnon with Edith, Ran and Guy. On the way down we had a quick look at the regular pair of Sooty Falcons, and indeed they showed well. We saw one quick copulation and quite nice activity, but as always it's too distant and dark across the gorge for photography.

This adult nightjar posed nicely:

This newly-fledged juvenile demonstrated some extreme action in nightjar standards: it caught a fairly large Praying Mantis, and started swallowing it while it was not dead enough. The mantis started to fight for its life, and scratched the nightjar like crazy on the face and inside its mouth (from personal experience I can admit it's quite painful!). In the end the nightjar gave up, got rid of the mantis and flew away. As usual I was driving and missed the photo-opp, but many thanks to Edith for allowing me to use her great series of images of this scene:

We had quite a few animals, including several hares, fox, jackal, and one large (ca. 120 cm) Diadem Snake.

Identification of gulls of Israel - new slideshow

Amir Ben Dov (with a bit of help from myself) created a terrific slideshow about identification of large gulls in Israel. It is a must for gull-addicts in the WP! This is part 1, part 2 will be online very soon. Of course, any feedback on ID of birds in the slideshow is most welcome. Enjoy!

Massive attack

This morning I returned to the same water cistern in the Negev Mts. I first visited two weeks ago. This time my team included Yosef, Re'a and Elon. We had yet another fantastic ringing session, and the water hole was so busy with many hundreds of birds coming in to drink. On the one hand, the wind was blowing pretty hard which reduced the effectiveness of our nets, but on the other hand it was bloody hot so many birds were very thirsty which must have brought us unusually large numbers of birds.
Our total for the morning (till 09:00!) was 257 birds!! The main species were a mind-boggling 160 Desert Larks, 42 Hill Sparrows (only two adults, all the rest juveniles), 32 Trumpeter Finches (down from 92 last time), 18 Rock Martins and a few other bits and pieces.

Hill Sparrow

This number of Desert Larks is unprecedented in Israel, and must have resulted of the heavy heat. Also, the total of 42 Hill Sparrows is the highest one-day catch ever in Israel, beating 36 ringed at IBRCE in April 2004.
This is such an amazing site, and shows very interesting population dynamics. I am sure long-term monitoring will produce many more interesting results in the future.
Some good birds were seen in the area - 6 Black-bellied Sandgrouse flew over, a pair of Common (rare in Israel!) Ravens were possibly visiting a nest nearby, and a late 2cy male Montagu's Harrier seen nearby.