Khobar's south corniche

At Khobar on Friday I moved across the road from the lakes to the coast and starting walking south down the corniche. I was watching out to sea as well as looking in the trees along the landscaped walk way.

The sea viewing was much more rewarding than the land views. All I got from the trees were house sparrow and common myna.

flamingo off the south corniche, Khobar

Looking seaward was a different story. I headed down towards a group of flamingo in some shallows. There were a few Caspian gull and fewer Steppe gull in the sea near them.


Out to sea are a row of warning signs which socotra cormorant use as rests in summer. However this time there were displaced by great cormorant. Indeed I only saw two socotra cormorant all day.

great cormorant

All the time I was keeping an eye out for any flying terns especially my target of sandwich tern. However, on this stretch of the coast I saw no terns of any type! 

Further down the coast things got very interesting. I reached an inlet I knew from previous visits was a good sea birding spot. 

The sea was at low tide and much of the sheltered inlet was mudflats.

hundreds of black headed gull and other birds

In the shallow water of the inlet were literally hundreds of gulls. A big majority were black headed gull. A few were slender billed gull. One of these had already acquired a pink wash which they have in the early breeding season.

black headed gull in flight

I looked through all these gulls meticulously searching for other species.

Caspian tern

I found two types of tern in among them. These were Caspian tern and gull billed tern.

gull billed tern

However the mud flats also houses many tens of waders and it was among these that I got lucky.

One of the waders remained away from the water and was detached from the others much of the time (though a grey plover spent some time with it). The lonely wader turned out to be a Eurasian golden plover.

Eurasian golden plover

This is officially down as a vagrant in Saudi Arabia so I checked my identification on BirdForum and it was confirmed. As said on the forum, it is big bellied, short necked, short billed as well as having a long primary projection. All these factors point to Eurasian golden plover rather than any confusion species.

Eurasian golden plover on both legs

The species is down as rare in Bahrain, Kuwait and UAE but vagrant in Saudi Arabia. I believe this has more to do with under-reporting than reality. I could even see Bahrain over the water from the mudflats!  Why would the bird miss out the east coast area between all the other three countries?

Jem Babbington reported one from Jubail (on the same coast as Khobar) in November 2011. Brian James who birds out of Thuwal north of Jeddah has it on his list. The trip report from 2002 to the south west on the OSME website reports two in May that year.

Eurasian golden plover is the 317th bird on my Saudi list.

bar-tailed godwit

The inlet had mostly long legged and larger waders rather than short ones.

There were a small number of both bar-tailed godwit and black-tailed godwit.

black tailed godwit

There were fifteen greenshank which was the largest group I have seen at one place in Saudi Arabia.

retreating greenshank

A similar number of common redshank were present. When disturbed both the greenshank and common redshank preferred to just walk away rather than fly.  I took this as a sign they were very relaxed there.

retreating redshank

Among the black winged stilt were a few oystercatcher.

oystercatcher and black winged stilt

As almost anywhere along the coasts of Saudi Arabia there were western reef heron too.

dark morph western reef heron

After this successful visit to Khobar, I moved on up the coast to Dammam for the rest of the day where there were some different species including another tern and both curlew and whimbrel. I'll write about this next. I'll also include a species list for the whole trip.

Black winged pratincole and more in Riyadh

On Saturday, an early morning trip to some new places west of the city had to be aborted due to car troubles. So I improvised. 

It meant a late start because it took time to rearrange. Furthermore, if you go birding after about 10 am at this time of year, then its best to choose an area close to water. 

One of my choices was the lake near Riyadh cricket club south east of the city. 

Here were the usual resident collection of of ferruginous duck, mallard duck, coot, moorhen and spur winged lapwing along with a few local waders. 

The local birds are always very nervous but visiting migrants are different. They tolerate closer approach and once again there were significant numbers of these. 

In particular a large mixed group were on an island where I could get good views. Many of the birds were wood sandpiper.

However, two of the birds there were quite special.  

black winged pratincole stretching wings

One was a black-winged pratincole which is exceptionally rarely reported in the Riyadh area although I saw five much further north near Buraydah in spring.

This bird conveniently stretched its wings to show black underneath and no white trailing edge. Before this moment, I already had my suspicions that it wasn't the much more common collared pratincole. 

For a start, it was 3 weeks later than the last collared pratincole seen in the area and it was alone.

black winged pratincole with short streamers

The streamers are very small and short compared with the tail unlike with a collared pratincole where the streamers are usually the same length as the tail.  

black winged pratincole at rest

The amount of red in the bill is less than for a typical collared pratincole though I find this a relatively poor way of distinguishing between the two birds.

black tailed godwit

My initial attention was actually drawn to this mixed group by another bird altogether but which is nearly as rare in this area. A black-tailed godwit was standing head and shoulders taller than the other birds in the group dwarfing even the three ruff present.


The other birds in the group but not already mentioned were little ringed plover.

Kentish plover

The main local plover is Kentish plover.

black winged stilt

Black winged stilt is the other main local wader though I have little doubt that there are visitors during passage and the winter.

The lake near the cricket club was not my first stop on Saturday. I started out at Al Hair but I found that only two birds were active in the midday heat. One was barn swallow hawking over the fields but even many of them were resting.

barn swallow

The second was yellow wagtail. I saw more there on Saturday than ever before in Saudi Arabia.

yellow wagtail

Although many tens were in the near-by fields large numbers were also resting near the waters edge.  The picture below shows 40 such birds.

tens of yellow wagtail

Almost all other bird activity had ground to a halt presumably until late afternoon. Of the finch members normally seen in large numbers in the fields, only a few Indian silverbill were out at times. The others kept almost totally to the shade. 

Indian silverbill

A few other birds were observed and all were reluctant to move so as not to waste energy. For example, the squacco heron below allowed close contact.

Squacco heron

Very close by, I accidentally flushed a little bittern and more predictably several moorhen.

After an hour or so in this heat I began my journey back towards Riyadh which ended with the visit to the Cricket club lake already described.

In between times, I did an hour's "bush bashing", walking around Acacia bushes in the Al Hair area away from the pivot fields. I was looking for red-breasted flycatcher which is a rare migrant through these parts but early to mid October is a good time to look.

little green bee-eater

I didn't succeed in finding it. Birding isn't usually that easy! In fact once again most birds were still deep in the shade. Even the little green bee-eater were resting.  I did manage to find yet another wryneck though. 

wryneck

It's been a bumper season in the Riyadh area for them this year.

Until I saw the black winged pratincole and black tailed godwit it had been the highlight of my day. But they obviously bettered it by some distance.