{"id":2054818,"date":"2018-12-13T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-13T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=7f038ef3913db6e2ee8cea765bfdeaac"},"modified":"2019-12-23T01:38:56","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T12:38:56","slug":"birding-with-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/birding-with-giants\/","title":{"rendered":"Birding with giants"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I had the pleasure and honour to bird with two ornithological giants – authors of e.g. the recently published Handbook of Western Palearctic Birds, Lars Svensson and Hadoram Shirihai. I know Hadoram well since my childhood, but it was the first time I birded with Lars.<\/p>\n

We met up at Ma’agan Michael with Dan my boss and had a good drive and walk around the ponds and beach. Though it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing birding site in the world, birding was certainly first class.<\/p>\n

Despite the strong wind we saw lots of birds, and some fine species including 3 Pallas’s Gulls, 7 Greater Sand-plovers, 4 Citrine Wagtails, and Jack Snipe. Full eBird checklist here.<\/p>\n

Pallas’s Gull – an immaculate 1cy, such a beautiful gull<\/p>\n

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Greater Sand-plovers – note the variation in breast pattern<\/p>\n

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With Kentish Plover on the left<\/p>\n

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A surprisingly tame Egyptian Mongoose<\/p>\n

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Then we went up Mt. Carmel to visit Hai Bar Carmel NP. Heading up, two Common Ravens flew by. Dan and I got excited (they’re rare in Israel, especially away from the remote desert) but later on we found out that one of them was released at Hai Bar.<\/p>\n

Hai Bar Carmel is a true conservation success. Despite the crash in Eurasian Griffon numbers in Israel, this site on the outskirts of Haifa has become their stronghold in northern Israel.<\/p>\n

During our short visit there we were treated to fantastic views of griffons, including several individuals of the rare un-ringed un-tagged subspecies.<\/p>\n

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Lars came over to Israel for our annual conference next week – looking forward to spend more time with him and his wife during the next few days.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I had the pleasure and honour to bird with two ornithological giants – authors of e.g. the recently published Handbook of Western Palearctic Birds, Lars Svensson and Hadoram Shirihai. I know Hadoram well since my childhood, but it was the first time I birded with Lars. We met up at Ma’agan Michael with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":2149133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[935,3392,3240,1025,2650],"class_list":["post-2054818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-citrine-wagtail","tag-common-raven","tag-jack-snipe","tag-kentish-plover","tag-mongoose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054818","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=2054818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2149133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}