Summer in Kuwait is searing hot and is traditionally a quiet birding month, however in late Spring we do have some species breeding at the Pools and mid-summer we have many Tern species breeding on the off-shore islands. Little Ringed Plovers (Charadrius dubius) have remained through the Spring and Summer and are suspected to be […]
Tag: White Wagtail
Rubʿ al-Khali; The Empty Quarter
At the start of this year I visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and was fortunate to spend a few days at Shaybah in the northeastern edge of this, the world’s largest desert. This region is classified as ‘hyper-arid’ with typical rainfall of less than 30mm per year and is one of the driest regions […]
Round up of Al Hayer in February
Last year I visited Al Hayer south of Riyadh almost weekly and it became what we birders call my local patch. This year I vowed to make trips more widely within Saudi Arabia and I have been doing so. However last weekend I returned to Al Hayer for the first time in over 6 weeks. […]
Vultures so close to Riyadh
On Thursday, after visiting the Kararah lake area, our birding party doubled back away towards Riyadh on the Mecca road before turning off north west. This was on route 505 according to the map but route 902 according to the road sign. This is an occupational hazard in Saudi Arabia, road sign numbers and map […]
Deffi Park, Jubail
I visited Deffi Park, Jubail for the first time on Thursday. It is a large city- based public park two kilometres inland from the Persian gulf. It is one of the best places apparently for migrant Eurasian thrushes and finches to be pushed down in mid winter. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t see one blackbird […]
Happy New 2013!
So where have the blog gone? Why are you not posting any more, we want to hear some updates… In fact, I can think of so many excuses but the truth is, that I was just too lazy and didn’t have the mood to sit down and write while so many observations and reports have […]
The new “blue lagoons”
In the late 1990s Tom Tarrant was birding the Riyadh area and he kept good records which I often compare against today’s findings. He has written about “the blue lagoons”. This was part of the Riyadh river where the habitat is more open than the area around the pivot fields where I normally bird. He […]
The Arrival Of Wintering Cranes
The last week has been pretty good bird-wise. The weather, as predicted let loose an enormous amount of water in Cadiz province just as I was returning from Eastern Germany & Poland. My flight from Berlin to Barcelona was delayed while they found a slot around more autumnal storms that were creeping up from the […]