{"id":35147,"date":"2013-03-06T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=2f73574511e7aad43fc2a3e5ca1cec16"},"modified":"2019-12-22T22:39:33","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T09:39:33","slug":"birds-on-the-east-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/birds-on-the-east-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"Birds on the east coast"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second blog to look at Mansur Al Fahad’s trip two weeks ago to the east coast. He saw a very large number and variety of waders, some of which gave almost as many identification headaches as the gulls. However this blog looks at some of the non-waders he saw. All the pictures are his and most have been cropped by me. I am grateful for his permission to post them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Flamingo<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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House crow<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Western reef heron (dark morph)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

The first two pictures show the beautiful and the ugly! Flamingo is common on the coast and house crow is common in the urban areas in the east. Flamingo is a winter visitor and house crow is a resident. All around the coastline of Arabia you can see western reef heron. On my visit to the Jizan area recently you may recall I posted a mixed pairing of dark and light morph.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Western reef heron (light morph)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

There are two common types of cormorant on the east coast. These are great cormorant and Socotra cormorant.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Great cormorant<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Despite two visits and plenty of time spent looking I have so far failed to spot any of the later bird. Indeed it has joined my revised list of nemesis birds.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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

Sekhet al Fasl near Jubail is one of the very few places in Saudi Arabia where you are pretty much guaranteed to see purple swamphen.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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water pipit<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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song thrush<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

And along the eastern coast line near Jubail, Dammam and Khobar you are also guaranteed to see water pipit in winter. You may recall I saw more in one day than in my whole life before the last time I went to Jubail.While on the subject of Jubail, Deffi Park in the city is worth a visit in winter because it is reported to be one of the best places in the kingdom to see northern migrant winterers such as blackbird, chaffinch, brambling and robin.<\/p>\n

However I know that several birding visits have been made this winter without success including one from me. Mansur has now come the closest. He observed a song thrush there which is not as rare but also not very common on the east side of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second blog to look at Mansur Al Fahad’s trip two weeks ago to the east coast. He saw a very large number and variety of waders, some of which gave almost as many identification headaches as the gulls. However this blog looks at some of the non-waders he saw. All the pictures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":2146038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[2123,2127,2138,938,1971,1597,2660,388,2474,3108,2233,877,2638],"class_list":["post-35147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-blackbird","tag-brambling","tag-chaffinch","tag-cormorant","tag-crow","tag-great-cormorant","tag-house-crow","tag-purple-swamphen","tag-rob-tovey","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-song-thrush","tag-water-pipit","tag-western-reef-heron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35147","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=35147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2146038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}