I had a couple of spare hours between dropping the family off and picking them up again in town so went to the Al Khobar Sea Front. This area is being heavily developed but has good tracks along the sea front allowing views over the tidal mud flats. The tide was completely out when I went which is not an ideal time but I did see a few groups of Greater Flamingos feeding quite close to the shore in wet areas left by the retreating tide.
I counted 120 birds including both adults in bright pink plumage and juveniles in their more drab greyish pink plumage. Greater Flamingo numbers are not very high in Dammam / Al Khobar when compared to Jubail, where several thousand birds spend the winter every year, but still several hundred birds use the Gulf close to the urban areas and are always a pleasure to see.
A bird with a large white plastic ring, originally ringed in Turkey also spent one winter in the Al Khobar area recently although all the birds I saw lacked any rings unfortunately. This is the first time I have seen the Greater Flamingos so close to the shore, as normally they feed out by the tide line and remain quite distant.
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.
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