High tide roost, Khobar

At the crack of dawn on Friday morning, Lou Regensmorter and I started our second full day's birding in Eastern Province.

We headed straight to the so called high tide roost between Khobar and Dammam on the coast. There is an inlet from the sea here which fills up with water at high tide causing the birds to move up into a small area.

For us this meant seeing eight or so western reef egrets together but when we looked more carefully there was more activity.

At least two Eurasian curlew were there but there were flighty.  This was another first for me in Saudi Arabia.

 

bar-tailed godwit

Much less flighty was a bar-tailed godwit which allowed close view as it was so busy feeding. This was yet another first.

great crested grebe

Although the number of birds was less than we might have expected the types exceeded my expectations. Swimming in the high tide water was a single great crested grebe. Once again another first for Saudi Arabia. So this shortish stop at a seemingly minor part of the coast provided 3 out of the 10 additions to my Saudi list which increased from 228 to 238 during the trip as a whole.

 

Western reef heron

In the immediate urban area we also saw house crow, red-vented bulbul and house sparrow.  It is quite remarkable that we didn't see a single white eared bulbul all weekend as this is the most common bulbul in the east of the country.

House crow

The rest of the birding day was spent along the coast at Dammam in a variety of habitat including mangroves and mud flats. It turned out to be a very rewarding day as I will show in the next blog.

Ain Kaam - a "river"

Ain Kaam is the name of the lowest part of Wadi Kaam where it reaches the sea. It is the longest permanent "river" in Tripolitania albeit less than  2 kilometres long.


The reeds are known to have resident reed warbler (and because they are resident they are probably African reed warbler) and zitting cisticola though they were not visited by me on Saturday because of a lack of time.


I only had time to see the river itself and a short stretch of one bank towards the estuary.


It was a fruitful time though.

cormorant drying its wings at Ain Kaam

On the bank I saw my first bluethroat in Tripolitania. Both the north west and north east coast have significant numbers of this bird wintering. There were also hoopoe, white wagtail and stonechat readily seen.

Each time I have visited Ain Kaam in winter I have seen cormorant - including one (not the same one) every time on the same rock!

great crested grebe

There were a couple of great crested grebe present this time. This grebe is the second most common wintering grebe on the northern Libyan coast after black necked grebe. Unlike the latter it's Libyan haunts are not on the distribution map of the best selling bird guide for Britain and Europe (which covers this area). 

common sandpiper

Four common sandpiper were on a second near-by rock. This was a good omen for the estuary but we didn't have time to visit it because I had to race back to the airport for my flight back to Benghazi. 

cormorant with escaped domestic duck

Finally I can report there were two (escaped) domestic ducks on the water. They are two of the luckiest domestic ducks in Libya. First it would appear they had escaped and second they managed to find a river!