Following my visit to the Rub’ Al-Khali, I returned to Dhahran which would be my base for the next few days. There were a few typical urban birds as well as some others of interest in and around the compound and some of the more open areas. Here is a selection of the common urban […]
Tag: Collared Dove
Birds of prey near Riyadh
Early spring is a good time to look hard at the birds of prey in the Riyadh area. The wintering eagles gather and seem to be reinforced by others on passage before moving on. Different types of other birds of prey pass through too. Last weekend saw some of these events. For example a fulvescens […]
The Desert Sparrow Project
The Desert Sparrow (Passer simplex) is a small passerine found in North Africa and Central Asia. So far two subspecies have been described for the Sahara desert (P.s. simplex and P. s. saharae); the third subspecies, localized in areas of Irán, Turkmenistán and Uzbekistán, also known as Zarduny’s Sparrow (P. S. Zarudnyi), may be split […]
The doves of Jizan
Its difficult to know where to start with the trip to Jizan last weekend but I am going with a nice self-contained group – the doves. You don’t go to the south west corner of Saudi Arabia without the hope of seeing African collared dove. Actually they aren’t that common but we picked a couple […]
Hypocolius and the Diplomatic Quarter
Just how do you count very large numbers of birds? I had this problem when I visited the Diplomatic Quarter (DQ) of Riyadh on Friday to see a couple of friends and do some birding in the landscaped grounds. The bird in question was hypocolius. They were all over the northern side of the Quarter. […]