A trip to the al Khobar Wader Roost South at the weekend was not very successful as the tide was about as far out as it could be. My timing was limited as I had to drop the family off at friends and this was the only time I could visit. There were still a […]
Author: Jem Babbington
Jem Babbington is a keen birder and amateur photographer located in Dhahran, Eastern Saudi Arabia where he goes birding every day. Jem was born in England and is a serious local patch and local area birder who has been birding for almost forty years and has birded in more than fifty countries. Jem is learning to ring birds in Bahrain as a perfect way to learn more about the birds of the area. Saudi Arabia is a very much under-watched and under-recorded country.
Breeding European Turtle Doves in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain
The only birds around at the moment on my local ‘patch’ are a few resident species and a couple of migrant breeders, with the European Turtle Dove Streptopelia turtur being a migrant breeding species with a few pairs breeding in Dhahran Camp. The birds we get in Saudi Arabia on passage are the more eastern […]
Birding Moldova – a less intensively farmed country
I have just returned from a trip to Moldova to stay for a few days with my wife’s family. Moldova is a country situated between Romania and Ukraine, just north of the Black Sea. My wife’s family live on a smallholding in the countryside adjacent to a large forest which is home to European Brown […]
Three birders covering an area of 710,000 km²
The whole of Saudi Arabia is under-watched bird wise, but the Eastern Province is particularly poorly represented with birders. This is mainly due to a lack of interest from the local population, with a few notable exceptions, and a restriction on foreigners travelling to Saudi Arabia unless they are working. Even if you are working […]
Identification of out of range Subspecies
Further to my last post on colour morph, sub-species or hybrid there are certain questions for field birders that are very difficult if not impossible to answer when dealing with sub-species. I encountered one of these problems whilst birding at Sabkhat Al Fasl (Jubail), Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia earlier in the year (March). Here […]
Sub-species, colour morph or hybrid?
Birdwatchers are becoming more and more interested in trying to identify sub-species of birds that they see. This may be because they feel they can identify most species they see and are trying to extend their knowledge, or for a small percentage they are doing it in case the sub-species in question is ‘split’ into […]
Ile aux Aigrettes (Mauritius) – A conservation success story
Ile aux Aigrettes is a tiny coral island 800 metres off the south-east coast of Mauritius near the small town of Mahebourg and has been declared a nature conservation site (1965) run by the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation since 1987. The island is 26 hectares in size and is made of coralline limestone partially overlain by […]
Black-winged Kite (Dhahran) a first for the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia
In the morning of the 29th March an adult Black-winged Kite (Elanus caeruleus) was present at the Percolation Pond in Dhahran Camp. The bird was sitting on top of a dead tree and was being mobbed by a flock of Common Mynas. Later in the day the bird was present in the Spray fields perched […]