{"id":1300611,"date":"2019-01-02T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=7c4d398f3cad54f2fe34e7da9593d998"},"modified":"2019-12-23T01:38:23","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T12:38:23","slug":"two-days-too-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/two-days-too-late\/","title":{"rendered":"Two days too late"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrived for a short family visit in Israel yesterday afternoon. This morning, completely knackered after yesterday exhausting day of travel, I did the obvious thing – I went in the early morning to Ma’agan Michael to see the putative Asian House Martin – potentially the first for WP. Since it was found by Barak, it remained extremely faithful to a very small area. I met up there with some friends and together we spent several hours searching for the martin amongst the thousand or so Barn Swallows.<\/p>\n

The only white-rumped birds we saw were two Little Swifts. The martin must have made a move – it was not seen yesterday either; last seen on December 27th. Luckily for me, I enjoyed birding so much this morning. It is so great to be in Israel. Sooooooooo many birds. And the weather was lovely. I shot today using 3-digit ISO today! I have almost forgotten how to shoot in sunlight. And company was great too.<\/p>\n

I birded in a small area for about 2.5 hours, not really hard – we were mainly looking at hirundines, so all other stuff was picked up randomly. I had 82 species (and 1 additional taxa…). Highlights were 8 Ruddy Shelducks, some Citrine Wagtails, what I think is possibly a Steppe Gull (need to do some more homework on it) and some Pallas’s Gulls, and on the way back home had two Black-winged Kites along route 6. How I missed this kind of birding.<\/p>\n

Black Storks – just because they’re so pretty<\/p>\n

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Super-tame Black-necked Grebe<\/p>\n

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This is the possible Steppe Gull. Almost cachinnans-like in structure. This neck streaking is typical. Dark bluish mantle. Medium sized bill with good gonys.<\/p>\n

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This flight shot is overexposed. P10 and P9 black all the way to PC. Black on P4, but pattern on P5 excludes YLG.<\/p>\n

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6 Pallas’s Gulls and one Armenian<\/p>\n

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Marsh Sandpipers and Spotted Redshank<\/p>\n

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Thistle Mantis (Blepharopsis mendica)<\/p>\n

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This is probably my last post of 2016. I had hoped to end the year with a bang, but hey – all part of the game. If the martin reappears while I’m here in the next week I will give it another try.<\/p>\n

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I arrived for a short family visit in Israel yesterday afternoon. This morning, completely knackered after yesterday exhausting day of travel, I did the obvious thing – I went in the early morning to Ma’agan Michael to see the putative Asian House Martin – potentially the first for WP. Since it was found by Barak, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":2149116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[705,736,3064,737,935,713,2756,1678,1395,1684,1052,2553,1857],"class_list":["post-1300611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-barn-swallow","tag-black-stork","tag-black-necked-grebe","tag-black-winged-kite","tag-citrine-wagtail","tag-house-martin","tag-marsh-sandpiper","tag-redshank","tag-ruddy-shelduck","tag-sandpiper","tag-spotted-redshank","tag-steppe-gull","tag-swallows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1300611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2149116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1300611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1300611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1300611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}