Nesting dark chanting goshawk

As previously reported, my birding friend Brian James toured south west Saudi Arabia in late March and found some excellent birds. For example, In two previous blogs I showed his pictures of painted snipe and Asir magpie. The former was found at Sabya waste water treatment lake and the latter at Tanumah, 100 kilometres north of Abha.

I am grateful to Brian who has now sent me more pictures of birds. These were seen at Wadi Mushraf (many variant spellings) which is near Abu Araish.

Dark chanting goshawk

Wadi Mushraf is next to Wadi Juwa which is well reported as a place to see Afro-tropical birds in Saudi Arabia but Brian found Wadi Mushraf better!

He saw both the small gaber goshawk and the much larger dark chanting goshawk there. The photo above shows he saw a breeding site too.

white browed coucal

Other Afro-topical birds in the wadi included white browed coucal. However this has quite a wide distribution compared with the goshawks and especially compared with gaber goshawk which is reported very local to Wadi Juwa (and now we now in Wadi Mushraf too).

helmeted guineafowl

Helmeted guineafowl were previously reported only common in wadi Juwa but there are also common in Wadi Mushraf too and have been seen by another birding friend Lou Regenmorter at Lake Maliki.

I am going to Jizan again in mid May and hope to see some or all of these species along with some returning Afro-tropical summer breeders.

Thanks again to Brian for the information and permission to reproduce his pictures.