Ornithology was the last thing on my mind when I pulled into the parking lot at Kibbutz Yotvata’s highway oasis in the Arava desert. We were on our way home from a vacation in Eilat and with four kids under the age of 10, we definitely needed the pit stop.
It was around 11 pm, and the temperature was still over 30 degrees as we got ready to get back on the highway. We re-arranged the young ones and tried to get comfy for the 3 hours of driving ahead of us. Two vans suddenly pulled in to the empty parking spots near us, the doors slid open and almost a dozen burly, clean shaven and military looking guys emerged. They appeared European, I thought I detected something Scandinavian, but their Israeli guide spoke English to them as they began unloading bags of equipment.
These guys were serious. Fancy backpacks, climbing gear, tripods and other equipment I couldn’t figure out. What were these guys doing in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert at some tourist trap off the highway?
Military or not, they were already dripping sweat as the hot desert wind blew over us, whipping paper cups and other garbage past my vehicle and theirs. They were gearing up, preparing to move out.
Their guide called them together for a mission briefing and I serreptitiously listened in as he gave details on the mission: paths, the height they would climb, watch out for the cliff edges. From their serious demeanor, cropped haircuts, athletic builds and various technical trappings I started guessing that they were on some private paramilitary training program.
Hah! Never more wrong was I!
Their guide suddenly woke me up to reality: he said he hoped to get them a few metres above the nest of some rare winged predator where they would all have enough room to creep up silently and set their cameras to catch the birds as the sun came up.
Bird watchers!!! And not just your ordinary “oh look, dear, there’s a robin!” type. These dudes were serious heavy duty birders, in pursuit of something rare, had travelled thousands of kilometres, and were packing out into the desert wilderness in the middle of the sweltering night where they were guaranteed to sweat buckets and turn their clothes into candidates for a detergent commercial.
Welcome to the other Israel you didn’t know about: the Holy Land is one of the world’s major bird watching capitals. It ranks in the top 100 places in the world for bird watching, and this time of year is why – all those birds from Europe and Asia who flew south to Africa for the winter are returning home, and the skies are sometimes full of clouds of migrating birds.
Not just a few, but half a billion birds twice a year. They head south in the fall, and back north in the spring. The most impressive are the pelicans, who fly in giant circular clouds of several thousand birds at a time – winding their way through the sky like some slow motion speckled tornado. Yikes 500 million birds… glad they generally fly on a path that’s not where my car is parked…
Have a look at the map and it’s pretty clear to see that Israel is the tiny wasp-waist of land joining Africa to Asia/Europe, and if you have wings and don’t like the cold then unless you like landing on water they only way to go is via Israel.
Bird watchers from all over the world include Israel on their hit list of places to go, and I had no idea bird watching was such a big industry in Israel, let alone the world over (check out Wikipedia, that says birdwatching is a multi-billion dollar industry).
And birds in Israel are photographed and written up constantly, like the apparently rare Oriental Skylark Alauda gulgula that was featured in the latest edition of the UK’s largest bird watching magazine.
Of course there are several bird watching organizations in Israel including the Kibbutz Lotan Center for Birdwatching, and the Israeli Birding Site located in Latrun, about half way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Although their site is in Hebrew, for birdwatching fans out there you can download and read their latest newsletter in English.
Me? I’m still impressed that there is a type of Blue Jay in Israel. No, not as colourful as the Blue Jays in the Great White North, but definitely their distant cousin. It’s a Eurasian Jay, known locally as an Orvani (pronounced OR-vah-knee). Now if only we had maple trees here for them to chirp on…
Related posts:
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.