Champions of the Flyway 2016 – blog 5

Day 5 – race day! 29 March

I was driving to start with, and actually did so all day.

We left just after 2am and, despite a flashlight incident, made good progress, picking up Greater Flamingo in the adjacent saltpans within five minutes. This was easy!  The next bird was a Barn Owl an hour or more up the road and so we were now scoring one species each hour – let me think, at that rate…

A clutch of birds including Long-eared Owl, Blackbird and Robin in the dark led to us arriving at Nizzana at dawn and soon seeing a MacQueen’s Bustard. Hooray!  But no Little Owl – boo!

The Inglorious Bustards team were very sweet and stopped their car to sing me ‘Happy Birthday!’.  Oh yes! So it is!

You don’t want a blow by blow account of the 138 species we saw, and I can’t remember all of them, but we kept quite closely to our plan and our previous day’s reconnaissance came in useful in deciding how to spend our time at Eilat.  In particular, we decided to skip the sandgrouse that we had seen yesterday evening as the clutch of other species we had seen at the site now looked less useful as we had collected almost all of them on the way south.

We reached 138 species with the last being an Egyptian Nightjar in the dusk.

McDonalds provided Desert Finch and Long-legged Buzzard again, and a clutch of migrant passerines, and a cup of coffee and an ice cream too.

The bird of the day, certainly for me, was a lifer which I had searched for with no success in Spain many times: Rufous Bush Robin (although, post-splitting, this is now the Eastern version of that Western species). We had great views of this bird as it was chased by a Masked Shrike – that’s what birding in new places is like!

There were birds that got away: only two of us saw the Pallid Swifts so we couldn’t count them. Only one of us saw the Snipe so we couldn’t count it.  We didn’t come across Black Stork at all – so we certainly couldn’t count that.

We felt that we had done badly – it just felt that we should have picked up an extra species or two everywhere we went – but as we finished the day it seemed as though many other teams were feeling the same too.  We were sure we hadn’t won: we were fairly sure we were closer to last than first: we were really really tired.  A bird race like this is a marathon and not a sprint. During this marathon we had never been in front and although we had gained a few places and some paces now and again, we were always in the back and didn’t have the ability to scythe through the field at the end of the race. but we had covered the whole distance and we had finished the race.  We were making up the numbers but we had a certain amount of satisfaction in having run the race. And you don’t often see a Rufous Bush Robin on a marathon.

 

The event is over – but the cause goes on! Please consider topping up our fundraising pot here. Thank you for all contributions.

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