ISRAEL’S BIRDS

Friends sent us, as a Pesach  greeting, a delightful You-tube link which shows a ceremony which took place recently at the Western Wall, to welcome back the over 80 pairs of resident swifts from their yearly sojourn in Central Africa.  Here is the link so you can enjoy watching it yourselves.  Although a number of the speeches are in Hebrew there are English ones as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kfZpyHdL5ns

As bird-lovers we were delighted that so much importance is attached to the Wall’s feathered inhabitants and so much care taken not to deter them from returning each spring.

SPRING AND AUTUMN MIGRATIONS

Israel is a wonderful country for bird-watchers, being at the junction of three continents, every autumn, 500 million birds of hundreds of different species, fly over Israel, heading south to spend the winter in the warmer weather of Africa, flying back the other way in the spring.  According to Dr. Leshem, Director of Israel’s International Centre for Bird Migration, most birds prefer to fly over land when migrating because it enables them to save energy by  using the warm, thermal air rising off the land below to assist their flights. This means that birds flying south from Northern Europe and Asia to Africa want to avoid the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas and so are funnelled down over Israel and the Palestinian Territories.  This results in Israel being on the second busiest bird migration route in the world, coming second only to Panama.

BIRDING IN EILAT

Although we love and are very interested in birds, in fact, all living creatures, we do not take them quite as seriously as the group of dedicated and experienced bird-watchers that we once joined for a birding excursion while holidaying in Eilat. They were all equipped with special binoculars and some had telescopes on tripods and carried notebooks in which they ticked off the varieties of birds they had seen and when a new variety, not already on their lists was spotted, the excitement was huge.  Suddenly, there was a muted cry of excitement from our guide, he had just spotted, he whispered, “A  Baillon’s Crake.”  We were ordered to follow him quickly and quietly over the small, wooden, bridge ahead  of us as this rare bird was in the narrow ditch below . The group was ecstatic, none had seen this species before and several said that seeing one was one of one of their life’s dreams.  The rest of the party were a lot younger and more agile than ourselves and so everyone except us followed the guide across the very narrow and highly unsafe-looking bridge.  As we stood hesitating, two young men grabbed Lola round the waist and picked her up most unceremoniously and carried her bodily across the bridge which wobbled and creaked alarmingly, “We can’t allow you to miss this wonderful opportunity, one of them whispered in her ear.”  Thankfully, safely on the other side, this amazing and apparently rare bird was pointed out to us, the amount of excitement  that its sighting had generated had given us false expectations, we had expected something exotic, multi-coloured plumes or at least a crested head, but there, dabbling in the mud,  was something that looked, to our untrained eyes, very similar to a common sparrow and a bedraggled one at that.  The rest of the party returned to the starting point, chattering excitedly and boasting about the photographs they had captured while we ignoramuses were left wondering what all the excitement had been about.  Yes, we love birds but are definitely not real twitchers, as dedicated bird-watchers are called.