Fujairah and Dibba beaches, UAE

A week ago Friday around the middle of the day Andrew Bailey and I visited Fujairah and Dibba beaches. Althouh the rest of my weekend in UAE has already been reported, I delayed this blog while I sought more expert advice than myown on the identity of some of the many terns we saw.

Indeed the highlight of this session was when some fishermen brought their catch ashore and 50 or so terns were attracted.

Most of the terns spent much of their time in the air looking for spilt catch. However there were always a few on the beach at any given moment.

A majority but by no means all were common tern.

whiskered tern

One that obviously wasn't was a whiskered tern in summer plumage.

Some were much more difficult to identify. Thanks to Oscar Campbell in UAE the one below has been identifed as a common tern and probaly a second calender year bird which is already quite bleached.

common tern

Some of the other terns in small numbers were as easy to identify as the whiskered tern. They were sandwich tern, lesser crested tern and great crested tern.

sandwich tern

In the group below next to the sooty gull there is one bird which is probably white-cheeked tern. It is the one on the left. The others are common tern.

white-cheeked tern (l) and 3 common tern (r)

Oscar Campbell has commented that it probably is a white-cheeked tern however it should be in breeding plumage "(unlike all White-cheeks in the Gulf, where birds are at nesting islands from late March) and the structure does not look especially different from the background Commons - in direct comparison, the bill of White-cheeked often looks very slender and narrow which is not the impression I am getting from this bird. It does look a little small but that might be an artifact of the image".

I would add that the legs do appear a little shorter than the other birds.

mixed terns

In the above picture the dark bird appears again.

Despite my concentration so far on the birds on the ground, most birds spent most time in the air.

common tern

Above is a common tern in flight.

Saunders's tern with common tern

There were also single birds of two other species: Saunders's tern and roseate tern. The latter is the rarest tern in the region at this time of year. I think Andrew Bailey for identifying it as a Bangsi type which has an orange-red bill. It wasn't present for as long as the other terns and I failed to get a photograph.

slender-billed gull

There were a few other birds on the beach. A few slender-billed gull were among them.

sanderling

Three sanderling were running along the sandy beach.

socotra cormorant

The terns were not the only birds to be attracted to the fish catch. Slowly but surely a group of socotra cormorant which were swimming drifted closer and closer to the shore. In the end they were less than 5 metres from the fisherman's boat.

more socotra cormorant

Straight after we left the beach we headed towards a water ditch a kilometre north. It appears to have been formed from the dirty water running off from a small development. Apparently some good birds have been seen there. However these types of site are very hit and miss and often depend on the amount of water released over the preceding days. This time the water levels were low.

glossy ibis

This time birds were limited to a glossy ibis and two moorhen.

dhow with great crested tern and lesser crested tren

An hour before we reached Fujairah beach we birded Dibba harbour and beach. This is where our encounters with terns began. A dhow in the harbour held fifteen lesser crested tern and a few less great crested tern. It's good to be able to see the two birds together. The great crested tern is notably larger, has a darker mantle and wings. It's bill is paler and yellower.

great crested tern

It was here we saw our only great cormorant of the weekend.

cormorant with terns

In all we saw nine species of tern over the weekend and it was really useful exposure to difficult group of birds to master.

In the next blog I return to looking at Salalah, Oman.

West of Mughsail

If you take the only road west out of Mughsayl and drive 9 kilometres there is a wadi at the bottom of a steep and twisty decent that the road takes. I can't find the wadi's name. 

I walked along it on Friday to bird watch speculatively. A car can't drive through.

male Arabian wheatear

The first birds I saw were two sand partridge but unfortunately I didn't have a chance to photograph them.

I soon came upon two Arabian wheatear sitting together on a rock. One was male and the other was female.

female Arabian wheatear

There were several white spectacled bulbul in the bushes.

white spectacled bulbul

Across the wadi about 30 metres way from me was a small cluster of trees. I starting walking towards them over the rocky terrain. On top of one of the trees were two Arabian golden winged grosbeck. They moved off just as I had identified them but it was quite a shock.

Having said that, I had previously seen reports of this bird in the Mughsail area at this time of year. Nobody really knows where they go in winter. A few clearly stay in the Ayn Hamran area as they are sometimes observed. However numbers seen there and at Wadi Hanna are far higher from April onward. Some people have speculated that they migrate away. This observation is another piece in the jigsaw.

another Arabian wheatear

To add to the good feeling about this wadi, a Verreaux's eagle flew over the northern slope. It's a very steep side and the eagle was flying at the very top. It was sometimes below the skyline and sometimes above.

Verreaux's eagle flying along the mountain side

This was exactly the same behaviour as I had previously seen at Jebel Samhan. The main difference is that the viewing there is from the top of the mountain. The views at this wadi were straight up.

Verreaux's eagle in the air

Birders often find that once they have found a difficult bird once then they see it easily form then on. This certainly seems to be the case with me and Verreaux's eagle.

shining sunbird

As I walked further up the wadi it narrowed and the birds became less frequent. Striolated bunting and shining sunbird dominated.

the wadi narrows

This wadi is worth a look at night. It looks ideal for desert tawny owl and is close to a known site for this species.

dark morph steppe buzzard

As I walked back down the wadi, I noticed one final bird high in the sky to the south. It was a steppe buzzard.

On the way back to Salalah, I stopped off at Mughsail again. However this time I didn't visit the khawr but the beach and coast.

five types of gull and tern

The beach held over 60 sooty gull but among them were a few other species. I managed to fit them all in one picture. There were 15 or so Hueglin's gull and the same number of lesser crested tern. I counted four greater crested tern and a single sandwich tern too. 

socotra cormorant

Directly off-shore from the gulls was a group of eleven socotra cormorant swimming in shallow water about 20 metres out.

three socotra cormorant

This afforded me my best views of this bird since I arrived in Oman. It was a pleasant end to a good session of birding.

Whirlwind look at Khobar

As part of our full day trip to the Eastern Province, Bernard Bracken and I made a whirlwind tour of the south corniche at Khobar. Time was necessarily short as places identified from historic records on the ebird database outside the town were still to be visited.  

western reef heron (dark morph)

Western reef heron and grey heron were two of the largest birds there and which would have been immediately obvious even to non-birders. There are two lakes barely 50 metres inland at the corniche and most of the herons were there.

common tern

There were several small groups of common tern next to the lakes too. 

lesser crested tern

Out to sea, a single lesser crested tern was sitting on a buoy.

Kentish plover

Meanwhile back at the lakes there was a good opportunity to compare the different types of small plovers at one place. Kentish plover was the most common.

Common ringed plover

Only a metre or two away from some of them were common ringed plover.

lesser sand plover

A solitary winter plumage lesser sand plover walked straight in front of some Kentish plover at one point.

common greenshank

Strangely I don't recall seeing any little stint or other small waders other than these plovers. However we were racing through the town and I may have missed them. Instead six or so common greenshank were picked up and several ruff were also seen.

Socotra cormorant (mostly juveniles) and a grey heron

Looking seaward there were many slender-billed gull in the water along with a single Caspian gull. Socotra cormorant were also highly visible. Many were first year birds. These can be easily separated from young great cormorant by the white fringes to the wing coverts. Looking at the head and bill isn't so effective as with adult birds!

After this quick-step look at Khobar we travelled south to Half Moon Bay in search of my main target bird for the day. I'll report in the next blog how we got on.

Socotra cormorant at last

June and July are two months when I usually don't do much birding in Saudi Arabia. The main reason is the heat. August is just as hot but the onset of the autumn passage forces me back into the field.

I don't stop birding altogether but I do try to take it easy. Its a good idea to pick mountain venues or stick close to the coast where breezes often blow. 

With all this in mind I visited Al Khobar on the Persian Gulf this weekend starting on Thursday lunchtime.

With 295 species on my Saudi list, its getting increasingly difficult to add new species but one relatively straightforward one was missing. That was Socotra cormorant. 

I had failed to see it on four previous visits to the east coast.

 close up of socotra cormorant

It disperses in winter from its breeding grounds which I understand include islands south of Khobar.Given that my previous visits to the coast were outside the summer and I didn't look hard in the Khobar area (spending more time in places like Jubail)  may have been part of my problem.

This time I decided to walk straight out of my hotel and on to the southern corniche at Khobar.

Needless to say I spotted several within 5 minutes of starting my birding! Why was it ever a problem?

 my first view of socotra cormorant

They were dotted along several buoys and posts out to sea but during the afternoon I also managed to get close encounters on the main land too.

 three socotra cormorant

In winter great cormorant are very much in evidence and I was surprised to see one in a coastal lake in June. This is supposed to be a wintering bird.

 great cormorant

Great cormorant was not the only "wintering" bird that I came across.

profile view of great cormorant

On Thursday afternoon, I saw a single slender-billed gull. It is known to summer as close as Kuwait but I hadn't expected too see one down here in June.

 slender billed gull

Terns on the other hand were expected. Its particularly easy to see them if you stand near the clusters of Filipino fishermen where I presume they hope to pick up scraps.

 common tern

As I watched the fishermen in one spot, both lesser crested tern and common tern milled about.

 second view of common tern

Further down the coast (but still within walking distance) I spotted a large group of lesser crested tern sunning themselves.

lesser crested tern in flight

This southern end of  Khobar's corniche was much better for birding than the over-landscaped central area. The density of terns for example was much higher.

 several lesser crested tern

There was one other tern I saw on the southern corniche (despite being a generally poorer birding area another was seen on Friday on the central corniche and will be discussed in the next blog). However for once I cant fully identify what the ones seen on Thursday were. They were young birds and either Saunders tern or little tern. Both are found here in summer. Young birds are very difficult to separate and I didnt either get good enough views or good enough photos to make a call.

Young Saunders or little tern

The only small wader I observed on Thursday was Kentish plover which clearly breeds along this strip of coast. It was very common.

 Kentish plover

Western reef heron of both morphs were also easily seen. The one below was showing the reddish flush to the bill only seen in high breeding season.

 Western reef heron 

Turning to non-water birds, I have rarely seen crested lark in such an urban environment before. They were mingling with the house sparrow and common myna on the grass lawns.

 crested lark

To complete the picture of Thursday's birding stroll along the corniche, four types of dove were also present: Namaqua dove, pigeon, laughing dove and most commonly collared dove.  

laughing dove

On Friday I ventured more widely and spent some time in the Dammam port area. Different types of waders were more evident. I'll blog about this next time.