2024-12

9th December 2024

A few years ago (in December 2021) Miriam and I had a wonderful few days in the oasis of Ein Gedi close to the Dead Sea. I wrote about our visit – see https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/nature-of-ein-gedi-a-photo-essay/ and posted one or two of the best photos on Facebook. On one of our walks, two little hyraxes glared at me (the Grey) and one of them showed his dentition – clearly indicating I was not welcome. I posted the photo on Facebook with a caption ‘Syrian Rock Hyraxes - The Good and the Bad, waiting for the Ugly’. Twenty-four of my friends were kind enough to press ‘like’ when they saw the pic on their Facebook feed.

Last week, my clever niece, Tamar, spotted the photo on her FB feed – in a post by ‘Teh Lurd Of Teh Reings’ and I was staggered to see that more than 12,000 ‘Rings’ fans have ‘liked’ it, shared it or commented about it.

I did a bit of a search with Google Lens and found that there are several other social media posts that include my photo, and it has been seen and liked by literally hundreds of thousands of viewers – most of them Tolkienist Ringers.

How powerful social media is – but are they allowed to use my photo, without asking my permission? Actually, they are, because I signed away my copyright rights when the photo was included on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_hyrax in the ‘gallery’ of photos.

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5th December 2024

Ducking and diving and some dabbling

Last week I spent an enjoyable hour in the bird hide (or bird blind, in American English) at Gazelle Valley in Jerusalem. Enclosed in a tiny wooden box, I was captivated by the beautiful mallards swimming freely across the small lake (actually more of a puddle). They were going about their business, ducking and diving, as ducks do – doing headstands and generally having fun. When I got home and reviewed my photos, I realised they weren’t mallards, at all – they were Northern shovelers. The males are rather beautiful with their iridescent dark green heads just as mallards are – but the bills are somewhat different, the shoveler having a dark blackish spatula-like bill while the mallard’s is yellowish and not quite so broad. The females, though, have a very similar appearance.

Although they appeared to be good divers – these ducks are not divers but dabblers. Divers, dive deep; dabblers dabble around the surface.

While at the Valley as well as gazillions of gazelles, of course - I also saw a woodpecker, kingfishers, bulbuls, chukars (game birds), plovers, prinias, a pied wagtail and an Egyptian goose – a bird-watcher’s paradise.

In my photos, the shovelers of Gazelle Valley are swimming from right to left and the mallards (from a previous visit to Netanya) are going left to right.

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3rd December 2024

‘I caught this morning morning's minion, king-/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon’

So expressed Gerard Manley Hopkins almost 150 years ago in his poem The Windhover.

I guess that if Hopkins were to have had a digital camera and WhatsApp he’d have written, as I would:

‘This morning, I photographed a kestrel’, or perhaps he’d have said he photographed a windhover, which was one of the names used in days gone by for the bird we knew in England as the kestrel, or here in Israel, as the Eurasian kestrel.

As one drives on the highways and byways between cities in Israel or in the UK, it’s always a joy to see a kestrel, which is a small falcon, hovering above the fields looking for a little vole for breakfast, lunch or tea - they need to eat six or eight voles a day to stay alive.

Amongst all the birds, kestrels are probably the best hoverers. They manage to remain perfectly still midair, by flying into the wind at exactly the same speed as the wind – and they adjust this speed as the windspeed changes. And even when there is no wind, they can still hover by changing the direction of their wings. That’s more than clever! Indeed, scientists are studying kestrel flight to learn how to make parcel delivery drones hover in different wind conditions. Actually, the scientists could learn a lot from me – many a day I go absolutely nowhere despite ‘flying’ frantically!

One of these two kestrel photos was taken at the Switzerland Forest last week – the bird was perched atop a high-strung plastic pipe. The other photo – the closeup – was a live (but caged) kestrel at the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Bet Shemesh, which we visited last week. This bird was unable to live in the wild and after being rescued has found a happy home in the museum.

More about the museum in a future post.

2024-11

26th November 2024

Sunday this week marked ten years since our immigration to Israel, which was a good reason for a celebration. So, we treated ourselves to a walk on Mount Arbel. This is something we’ve done so often in the last ten years, that you might think it a rather ordinary way to spend the day. But a visit to the Arbel is always exhilarating – especially as we hadn’t felt it safe to visit there for a number of months. Deadly rockets, missiles and drones are still raining down on us virtually every day in much of the north of Israel and on the coastal plain, but for the last few weeks Tiberias and the immediate locale has been missile free. With the forecast of heavy rain for mid-morning, we set off quite early and took the cliff walk to climb to the summit. We were rewarded for our efforts by seeing the first wildflowers of the season, which have now started to appear following a rainy period a week or two ago. We saw Persian cyclamens, meadow saffron (also known as naked lady – naked because the flowers emerge from the ground in the autumn without leaves) and sea squills (despite being nowhere near the sea). While we were watching the flowers, little birds were watching us - great tits, blue rock thrushes, and several crested skylarks, to make sure we didn’t come close enough to photograph them. We often see butterflies at the top of the mountain – particularly swallowtails. On Sunday there weren’t any swallowtails, just a solitary marbled white. But there were rock hyraxes frolicking around the boulders near the cliff edge. The special treat, however, was to see the tiny Arbel snail – unique to this area. These snails emerge from crevices in the rocks after rain, and we were lucky enough to get a minor drenching just as we reached the mountain peak. So, on the way back we watched the snails (just half an inch in length) as they went in search of algae on the rocks. As we drove away from the mountain, we saw a fox sitting right in the middle of the road, but it scooted off into the woods as we slowed down to get a better look.

Just a few hours later, as we were having a bowl of hot soup in a café a mile or two from the Arbel to warm up after our soaking, sirens blared back there at the Arbel. A minute later we heard the very loud explosions as the iron dome intercepted the rockets that were sent by our neighbours north of the border, intending to kill and maim. Thank G-d there were no injuries on this occasion. But more than two hundred and fifty rockets were fired into Israel on Sunday and, sadly, in the centre of Israel there were indeed injuries. Maybe today we’ll see a big change in the situation.

The photos are meadow saffron, sea squills and a rock hyrax.

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25th November 2024

The last post in this blog was about passerine birds, perching birds with toes perfectly formed for grasping and resting on a branch (three pointing forward and one back – known as anisodactyl). Here are some more. I saw a jay a few weeks back, it perched deftly on the rim of a bowl of water, before hopping away after quenching its thirst. Then a few days ago I observed a white-spectacled bulbul (also known as a yellow-vented bulbul) as it perched on a branch - its yellow underparts clearly visible.

But not all perching birds are passerines – this white-throated kingfisher perched for a long time on a piece of rotting wood in the harbour in Tiberias but has syndactyl feet - the third and fourth toes being fused together. Despite this, it seems to manage very nicely and perched quite happily prospecting for its next meal.

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19th November 2024

One of my favourite photos is of a passing house sparrow (Passer domesticus) that stopped for a quick chat with Miriam. As you can see from the photo the friendly little fellow perched on her boot. The sparrow is the archetypal passerine - bird of the order Passeriformes.

Passeriformes (from the Latin, of sparrow-shape, sparrow being a passer) is the largest order of birds, all of which have their toes perfectly formed for perching (three pointing forward and one back – known as anisodactyl). Lots of the birds we see, perched on trees, are passerines.

Yesterday morning. In the Switzerland Forest, we saw one such bird – a female sun bird – a tiny bird, about 4 inches long (10cm) and weighing just seven grams, which is about the same weight as a pencil. A week or two ago I photographed its male counterpart with iridescent blue plumage. The sunbirds might be tiny, but their down-curving beak isn’t. It’s about as long as the bird’s head and is perfectly formed for extracting nectar from flowers, in conjunction with its long brush-tipped tongue. It also eats insects and if you look closely at the picture of the female, you can just see an insect wing in its bill.

The next post will include photos of some more passerine birds.

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4th November 2024

Yesterday morning, I walked by the side of the Kinneret and around one of the small harbours in Tiberias. It was a hot sultry morning; thundery too, and I had the place totally to myself aside from a few mad dogs. During my walk, I played a bit of cat and mouse with a young night heron, a large grey heron, a little egret, a pygmy cormorant and a white-throated kingfisher. They all thought it was great fun to fly off as soon as I raised my camera, but eventually they realised I was a harmless old Brit and allowed me to get a quick shot.

After I’d been walking for a while I encountered two mounted bobbies (if you’re not British, you’d probably call them policemen on horseback). One of them spoke to me in reasonably good English. I asked him how he knew I spoke the language – I thought that after ten years here, I was beginning to look and sound like an Israeli, but obviously not. This policeman had presumably been to the Sherlock School for Detectives or more probably was Mossad trained – but either way, he was able to tell that a fellow walking in the hot sun, with a sunhat and a camera would speak the King’s English. I had thought they were checking that the beaches were empty – at the moment, because of the threat of rockets from the North and the East all beaches around the Kinneret are closed – so, I told him that I was photographing birds, just in case he thought I was about to do a bit of sunbathing, or paddle in the lake. Then I asked him what they were doing today. He told me that on Shabbat/Saturday afternoon a kayaker had gone missing just 20 metres from the shore where we were speaking. The bobbies were still out looking for him, and so were police boats patrolling the lake nearby. Sadly, lots of people underestimate the power of the Kinneret, which though not as fierce as Rembrandt depicts in his famous painting, ‘The Storm on the Sea of Galilee’, nevertheless claims several lives each year. There are very strong, hidden currents in this freshwater lake, which has the Jordan River running right through it, and swimming, boating or canoeing on it must never be considered lightly.

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3rd November 2024

Just a week or two ago we had a lovely walk by the River Alexander (near Netanya) with Debra and Aaron. As I was looking at a pecan tree and admiring the gigantic hard-shell nuts, and muttering to myself “hickory dickory dock” a gigantic soft-shell turtle emerged from the river and glared at me, presumably thinking I was a nut case.  After I’d finished photographing the pecan nuts and tree, which by the way, is a member of the hickory family of trees, I was able to photograph the turtle, while it was still looking somewhat baffled.

A day or two later as we left home to start another trip to Netanya, we heard a lot of honking and looked up for our first sighting this autumn of a skein of cranes (about a hundred or so). Feeling it was a lucky day, when we arrived, I took my trusty camera out for a walk hoping to see more exotic birds, and sure enough I did. The birds I found were very colourful flightless birds – birds of paradise, also known as crane flowers, which are native to South Africa. To adequately describe their magnificent beauty would need at least two thousand words – and as time is short, I’ve included two pictures, instead. And there’s also a photo of the tiny pea blue butterfly, which I saw in the woods that day. As you can see, despite its name, peas aren’t usually this colour.

On the way home I bought some pecan nuts and am looking forward to a slice of pecan pie.

2024-10

29th October 2024

I’ve just been reading two of my favourite books – The Curious Bird Lover’s Handbook by Niall Edworthy and The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers by David Wells. I’m not quite sure whether the bird book is a handbook for bird lovers who are curious or for lovers of curious birds – but either way, the book is right up my street. And yesterday I discovered a couple of interesting and curious facts. Birds don’t produce urine. And that is true for all birds, except for, curiously, storks and vultures, which do produce a sort of urine. And even more curiously, they use this ‘urine’ on a very hot day, such as those we have here in Israel at this time of year, to cool themselves down. They release the ‘urine’ on their own bodies and as it evaporates it cools them down. This technique, known as urohidrosis – a word that doesn’t appear in my dictionary – is also used by some basking seals, I guess if they’re far too lazy to get back in the water. Here’s some serious advice for you – if you’re out and about on a very hot day in Israel or elsewhere, and you need to cool yourself down – well, head straight for an airconditioned café and have an ice-cream or iced coffee – don’t even think about any such outlandish hydrotherapy!

In my opinion, the most interesting number of all, is the first number that isn’t considered by mathematicians to be interesting. In this book that number is 39, which is recorded in the book as being interesting for being uninteresting. Here is a curious fact – the golden ratio, known also as the divine proportion, 1.61803…., when squared is 2.61803…. This is the only positive number whose square is exactly 1 more than the number itself. Even more curiously this number, the golden ratio, 1.61803…. appears in nature, most notably in the spiral pattern of sunflower seeds. The angle between successive seeds in its head is approximately the golden angle (about 137.5 degrees), which is derived from the golden ratio.

I should probably get out more, rather than immersing myself in such curious books.

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9th October 2024

Sitting Ducks

We visited one of Israel’s best-known nature reserves recently (I have been asked not to say which one) and met the Chief Ranger. I asked if there was anything interesting to see and was told that on that very morning the rangers had rescued some ducklings. A visitor had released into the wild some young birds that appeared to have previously been kept in a domestic environment. Releasing young ducks without their mother to look after them usually results in a very quick death. And indeed, the crows in the reserve were already eyeing them up when the rangers spotted them. The birds, instead of fleeing, which is what most wild birds do when seeing people, waddled affectionately towards the rangers, which is what gave the game away as to their former domesticity. The rangers gathered them up and temporarily caged them while awaiting a visit from the vet to check their health. The Chief Ranger is now looking for a suitable home for them where they will be able to live unthreatened by foxes, jackals or birds of prey.

“Releasing creatures into the wild sounds such an ethical thing to do,” we were told, “but it actually causes a whole lot of unnecessary suffering for them, as they are totally ill-equipped to fend for themselves or stay out of danger from predators.”

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1st October 2024

We’ve just had a couple of weeks of running to and from the bomb shelters in Tiberias, dodging rockets and missiles fired at us by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. As well as our own shelter at home, we’ve been in a shelter at our local supermarket, one at the doctor’s clinic and had to endure one attack taking cover in a ditch by the side of an Inter-City highway. We’re now in Jerusalem for a few days for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) – and hoping for a quieter time.

One of my favourite Jerusalem activities is gazelle gazing in Gazelle Velley. Yesterday, I got to meet a rather handsome buck with beautifully ringed horns. The males use their horns to display their virility to potential mates, and also for foraging for food and to fend off predators. But why are their horns ringed? I’m really not sure, so I’ll be doing some research as there must be a good reason.

While I was focussing on gazelles Miriam spotted a flycatcher sitting on the fence – a spotted flycatcher, no less. Flycatchers make little sorties, known as sallies, to catch flies and then return to the same place from where they set off. This sallying, also known as hawking, is also particularly noticeable with dragonflies and so keeping the camera lens trained on the same place, even after they’ve gone off, is well worthwhile.

I also watched a pair of spur-winged plovers by the side of a small pond. Plover is pronounced to rhyme with lover and not with over. As you can see, the two birds I photographed had just had a plover’s tiff and weren’t talking to each other.

The blackbird I photographed, looking a bit shabby, hadn’t lost his feathers in a scrap, but had lost a few head feathers to make way for new ones – a process known as moulting, which birds do once or twice a year to renew the strength of their plumage.

A leopard doesn’t change its spots, but let’s hope and pray that our neighbours will grow new feathers, as birds do, and will live together peaceably with us in the New Year – a better year than the last, with the safe return of our hostages who’ve been held in captivity for almost a full twelve months.

2024-09

26th September 2024

There was a lot of aerial activity above us on Tuesday.  From the safety of a town centre café, I watched as the iron dome intercepted Hezbollah missiles aimed at Tiberias.  And yesterday morning there was more unwelcome action - a rocket coming towards us from Syria was taken out by the IDF, while we spent ten minutes in the air raid shelter becoming better acquainted with our neighbours. Not to be deterred, we drove South along the Jordan Valley to a well-known birding location, Kfar Rupin, from where there are great views over the river-valley and beyond into Jordan. En-route we saw aerial activity of the sort that we delight in. Storks were circling high above, accompanied by raptors riding the thermals. We sat in a bird hide at Kfar Rupin, looking out over a very small lake - perhaps pond or mere, or mere puddle, would be more accurate names for it. The birds there seem to understand ‘bird hide’ as an instruction to them, and they remained out of sight for a long time. But after half an hour or so we watched a white-throated kingfisher fly past, as well as some bulbuls, while damsel flies and dragon flies vied with each other for the best resting places on lakeside rushes. A black kite looked down on us from a great height, while swallows skimmed over the lake virtually touching it from time to time, while we were drinking in the peace and quiet, disturbed only by the breeze rustling the reeds. Actually swallows do touch the water surface when they fly over it, and while doing so, drink in a quick beakful of water. I didn't manage to photograph the birds, but the insects and the splendid palm trees were more amenable to a photo shoot.

As we walked along the shadeless path to a further lookout, atop a knoll bearing the name Karpas Hill, I wondered to myself, “Are palm trees really trees?” Their shape and structure are so different from the normal branching varieties we are so used to. Experts are divided in opinion – some say date palms are trees, while others say they are woody herbs. We happened to pass a chaste tree (aka monk's pepper), which I have to say I thought at first was a rosemary bush – as you can see from the photo. But it’s the wrong time of the year for rosemary, so with a bit of research (with Google Lens) I quickly discovered its true identity. It’s presumably called chaste, because apparently mediaeval monks used to eat its berries (chasteberries) to reduce their sexual desire. Not quite sure why it’s also called monk’s pepper – as some people say that pepper is an aphrodisiac, which doesn’t seem to go together with calming their impulses.

Before finishing this blog post, I can’t pass over the opportunity to tell you that from Karpas Hill there are great views in spring of parsley, potato and celery growing in the fields below J. 

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25th September 2024

Earlier this week, we walked by the Alexander River near Netanya. It’s been a good few weeks since Miriam and I and my camera went for a good country walk. During those few weeks I was recovering from a bout of shingles – which, as shingles goes, was quite a mild bout, and the pain wasn’t too intense - but I was very tired and didn’t really have enough energy to exercise my telephoto lens. Fortunately, I feel much better now, and what better way to return to nature than a walk by this beautiful river just a mile or two from the Mediterranean coast.

The Alexander River is most noted for the African softback turtles that frequent its waters. And we weren’t disappointed, as we watched these large (50kg) turtles gracefully swim by and occasionally poke their heads out of the water, basking while gliding along. At the riverbank was a much smaller Caspian turtle (with a hardback shell), basking in the warm sun. There were swallows swooping, rock-martins chattering, parakeets screeching past at speed, and glossy ibises flying overhead, as well as a hovering kestrel that dived down into the grass. As we walked downstream, we saw a large grey heron waiting patiently at the riverside, but it wasn’t that patient and before long flew up to a high tree overlooking the river to gain a bird’s eye view of the fish below. But the highlight of the walk for me, was to see two rather small birds - a red-backed shrike and a wheatear.

Shrikes have bit of a monstrous reputation, which is actually well-deserved. They’re known as butcher birds, because after killing their prey (small mammals) they hang it up to dry on barbed wire, much as butchers do with their carcasses. Anyway, barbaric butcherers they maybe, but they’re rather nice to look at – the one who posed for me was a juvenile, who probably didn’t have too much blood on his hands yet.

Wheatears have an interesting name – but nothing to do with wheat, ears or even ears of wheat. Rather, they get their name from their white rear. They’re little birds that catch flies as they fly – they’re part of the flycatcher family of birds.

The evening before our river walk, we went out for a coffee in a local shopping mall. As we came out, we found a dead bird that appeared to have dropped out of the sky. It was still perfectly formed, and had one wing extended to reveal clearly the beautiful variegated colours of its plumage. Google lens identified it as a common quail, though it looked too attractive to be called common anything. Of course, quail have long been found in these parts – these are the birds that dropped out of the sky and sustained the Children of Israel during their for forty years in the desert as they journeyed, more than three thousand years ago, from Egypt to Israel.  

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3rd September 2024

Some of the most colourful and remarkable little creatures we see are common chameleons. Last week we were walking in woods with our grandchildren and our little granddaughter spotted a tiny little lizard. On closer examination it turned out to be a very small chameleon, about two inches long. She did well to spot it - as well as being tiny it was well-camouflaged - she's got a good eye. And so does the chameleon. In fact, quite remarkably, it can have one of its eyes looking forward and one backwards. There's a photo of mine on Wikipedia showing a backward-looking chameleon - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_chameleon and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_chameleon#/media/File:Chameleon-LookingBack.jpg. The chameleon has a remarkable tongue too, it’s about one and a half times its own body length. No wonder it gets tongue-tied. But of course, the chameleon is most well-known for its ability to change colour. What is less well-known is that primarily its colour changes are related to its emotions rather than to match its background.

The little chameleon chappie we saw was quite a comedian, as you can see from the video clip. It was barely bigger than a newly hatched infant. They emerge from their eggs some 10 to 12 months after they are laid. And then take a further year or so to reach full size – about 8 to 16 inches.

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 1st September 2024

I keep hearing reports that the migration season has started. Cranes, storks and honey buzzards have been spotted overhead – but not yet by me. I’m keeping my eyes trained on the skies and hope to be able to tell you soon of some successful sightings. But for the moment, I must be content with what I see at ground level.

A couple of weeks ago at Ramat Hanadiv I noticed a hoopoe hopping around an olive grove. I approached trying to hide behind trees to stay out of view. I was rewarded for my game of hoopoe hide and seek with a view of the male hoopoe’s headdress – a fully erect crest – a feather crown. It displays its crown majestically as a mating sign, to show its virility and also when it feels threatened, perhaps to indicate its size and strength.

A few seconds later it fanned its tail and prepared itself for a dust bath or an ant bath. A bird will roll its feathers across dust (dust bathing) as a way of secreting its preening oil to keep its wings well-lubricated and in good shape. Or it will rub its feathers on ants to obtain formic acid from them, which likewise is beneficial to its wings.

As you can see my hoopoe hunting was a happy experience with photos of a hoopoe anting, or perhaps just getting a dusting down.