{"id":2057627,"date":"2019-04-02T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=da29b521e53ccb82e583f7a64eb35716"},"modified":"2019-12-23T01:42:11","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T12:42:11","slug":"eilat-day-3-holland-and-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/eilat-day-3-holland-and-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Eilat day 3 – Holland and Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I continued with my demanding task to assist teams in their scouting efforts, which actually meant birding in cool spots. Isn’t it appropriate that on pre-race date I visited two sites that could be identified with our Dutch team – Team VCF, and Canadian team – The Canucks.<\/p>\n

First thing in the morning I birded Holland Park together with Mark and Anat. At our hotel doorstep we had a flock of 53 Baltic Gulls fly over on their long migration between Lake Victoria and Finland – the stuff Eilat legend is made of.<\/p>\n

After lunch I had a quick look in Canada Gardens, where a Semicollared Flycatcher continued to show extremely well. Another top-quality bird. Sadly light was harsh – the promises for Armageddon weather down here never materialised.<\/p>\n

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Birding Holland Park started somewhat quiet; the Black Bush Robin showed very well close to the entrance but wouldn’t play ball.<\/p>\n

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A gorgeous male Northern Wheatear posed against a dramatic backdrop of Eilat Mts.:<\/p>\n

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Pretty good numbers of Balkan Warblers:<\/p>\n

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Sand Partridge – male<\/p>\n

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Real action was in the Sylvia camp, especially around the Magic Bush – a huge flowering<\/p>\n

Capparis decidua<\/p>\n

that attracted many tens of warblers. Most prominent were Rueppell’s Warblers – around 10 in that one bush. They are real bullies, constantly harassing all other warblers and each other:<\/p>\n

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But the real star was Eastern Subalpine Warbler. Two males were in that bush, one of them was a real performer – feeding at extremely close range. What a fantastic bird. I have many more images – a dedicated blogpost will follow.<\/p>\n

Eastern Subalpine Warbler – 2cy male<\/p>\n

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While heading out a flock of five Penduline Tits flew in – so cool to see them away from reedbeds, in a desert wadi. They were very mobile so managed only these record shots.<\/p>\n

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In the afternoon we had a final briefing and swap meet for COTF teams at IBRCE. After the meeting we spent another fantastic hour vis-migging from the dyke – very cool stuff including Little Swifts, Dead Sea Sparrows and many more (but still no oriental cigar).<\/p>\n

Two hours till COTF – time to get a bit of sleep.<\/p>\n

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

Today I continued with my demanding task to assist teams in their scouting efforts, which actually meant birding in cool spots. Isn’t it appropriate that on pre-race date I visited two sites that could be identified with our Dutch team – Team VCF, and Canadian team – The Canucks. First thing in the morning I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":2149203,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[6601,8230,755,2844,7820,3899,536],"class_list":["post-2057627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-black-bush-robin","tag-dead-sea-sparrow","tag-northern-wheatear","tag-penduline-tit","tag-pine-warbler","tag-subalpine-warbler","tag-wheatear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057627","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=2057627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2149203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}