{"id":30339,"date":"2013-01-09T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=025c8d4c602e992dc1c1e0ae67d06f28"},"modified":"2019-12-22T22:34:08","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T09:34:08","slug":"the-heron-family-near-jizan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/the-heron-family-near-jizan\/","title":{"rendered":"The heron family near Jizan"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the trip to the Jizan area, much of the heron family activity was at Lake Maliki. This is the largest fresh water mass in the kingdom by a big margin.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Glossy ibis, squacco heron and marsh sandpiper – Photo by Mansur Al Fahad<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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A view across the back waters of Lake Maliki<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

The two commonest heron family members were glossy ibis and squacco heron. I looked carefully through the glossy bis for juvenile northern bald ibis. This is a known area for the wintering of the Syrian population which is in danger of extinction.<\/p>\n

At one stage a cluster of glossy ibis with other birds included great egret, little egret, redshank, ruff, black winged stilt, northern shoveller and garganey (partially captured in the picture below).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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glossy ibis, great egret and several other species<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Cattle egret were also present in numbers and were most often seen in the adjacent fields.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Cattle egret with some sheep – Photo by Mansur Al Fahad<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

I think there were probably more purple heron than grey heron around. This is indicative of the southern latitude.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Purple heron<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Arguably the best sighting in the heron family was a great bittern. This was my first sighting in Saudi Arabia despite. Surely not many great bittern are found this far south.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Rear view of a great bittern taking off – Photo by Mansur Al Fahad<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

It evaded good pictures. Mansur got a rear view and I got a slightly blurred picture in flight.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Great bittern on the move<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Early in the first morning before we reached Lake Maliki, we birded a small wadi. Here a flock of spoonbill was seen overhead on the move towards the coast from the direction of Lake Maliki.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Spoonbill – Photo by Mansur Al Fahad<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

We finally caught up with Eurasian spoonbill again at two or three places along the coast south of Jizan.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Spoonbill with dark morph Western reef heron<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Sadly goliath heron was not seen but it leaves something to look forward to on the next visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the trip to the Jizan area, much of the heron family activity was at Lake Maliki. This is the largest fresh water mass in the kingdom by a big margin. The two commonest heron family members were glossy ibis and squacco heron. I looked carefully through the glossy bis for juvenile northern bald ibis. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":2145731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[2621,1634,749,2757,750,2756,882,2474,1684,1208,883,2638],"class_list":["post-30339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-bittern","tag-cattle-egret","tag-glossy-ibis","tag-great-bittern","tag-great-egret","tag-marsh-sandpiper","tag-purple-heron","tag-rob-tovey","tag-sandpiper","tag-spoonbill","tag-squacco-heron","tag-western-reef-heron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30339","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\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2145731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}