maandag 5 maart 2012

The never ending blue skies of Eilat!

Yes, we arrived in Eilat! After five days of rain, snow, temperatures below 10 degrees Christian and I finally made it to the really ‘’Holy land’’! Yesterday morning we wanted to visit the Dome of Rock from closeby but the que near the security check was too long. So we bailed and took the early bus from 10:00 to Eilat. We passed the Dead Sea where we saw Long-legged Buzzard, Tristram’s Grackles and Brown-necked Ravens

We arrived at Eilat around 15:00. The always happy and funny Tzadok picked up us at the central bus station and brought us to the ringing station. Here we could slowly acclimate to the weather here. A bit later we met Yotam as well. We talked a bit and saw a Barbary Falcon that had gotten hold of a Swift. A dark morph Booted Eagle passed by as well. There were four British guys as well that had stayed here for a week and would leave again on Monday. They’ve had an excellent week for both ringing and birding as you have read on http://www.eilatbirding.blogspot.com!

This morning our alarm was set for 5.30 but the alarmclock wasn’t needed since I woke up at 5.25! We opened everything and started ringing. We currently have 15 nets opened combined with 6 Heligoland traps(actually 7, but one is severely broken by the wind). Roni arrived today around 13:00 which was nice too! Our first day was to say it in short: amazing already!

I’ll just show a couple of pics and the totals for today:

Barn Swallow 4 -
Blackcap 1 -
Bluethroat – 5
Chiffchaff 59 - 3
Common Whitethroat 7 - 5
Dead-Sea Sparrow - 1
Eastern Orphean Warbler 2 -1
House Martin 2 -
House Sparrow 1 - 1
Laughing Dove 1 -1
Lesser Whitethroat 5 -2
Little Crake - 1
Moustached Warbler - 1
Rock Martin 1 -
Rueppel’s Warbler 1 -
Reed Warbler (fuscus) 1 -
Sardinian Warbler 2 - 1
Spanish Sparrow 5 -5
Quail 2 -
White-spectacled Bulbul 2 – 4

Total 97 new 31 recaptures

Scops Owl – Tzadok brought this very exhausted bird in, it was really weak and probably won’t make it…

 Dead-sea Sparrow, female
 Little Crake, female
Quail, male
Rock Martin
Roni, Christiand and Itai.
 This Egyptian Fruit-bat was a surprise in the mistnets tonight..
Moustached Warbler.

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