2025-07

14th July 2025

It was great to visit the Hula Reserve for the first time in about three months. Being halfway between the spring migration and the autumn migration, it’s not the busiest time as far as birds are concerned – but I still managed to see kingfishers, herons, pelicans, cormorants, bee-eaters, raptors and other birds too, as well as mongooses, coypu and lizards.

I was particularly lucky to be able to get quite close to a rough tail rock agama that was standing almost upright on a rock face. This upright stance is one of the ways that it tells all the other agamas in the vicinity that they’re in the presence of the ‘king of the castle’. It also allows air to circulate around its body, which helps cool it down on very hot days. A few minutes later I saw another agama that was a little paler than had been that first king of the castle. I think it was in a bit of a mood. Just as chameleons can change colour, the rock agama can too – though the colour change is not nearly so pronounced. And like the chameleon, the colour change reflects its mood – it’s not nowadays thought to be an attempt to blend in with the environment, which it does very well anyway.

The purple heron isn’t really purple but more of a burnt-chestnut and slate grey mixture, and also blends in nicely with its environment. It’s quite hard for photographers to spot them in the reeds but more important for the heron is, that its prey doesn’t see it either as it stands perfectly still mimicking the reeds around it. This mimicking behaviour is known as bitterning, a trait that is perfected by bitterns. When we were in Britain recently, we knew we were in the vicinity of bitterns when we heard their booming, but try as we might, we couldn’t spot them at all.

On the lake at the Hula were a dozen or more pelicans and a number of terns. I watched a pelican glide across the lake with terns circling above it. As they came near, the pelican got quite agitated and opened its huge bill to frighten them off. The terns were clearly harassing the pelican trying to steal an easy meal – a behaviour known as kleptoparasitism. The pelican won the day, and the lazy terns had to go off and do some ‘honest’ fishing.

2025-06

8th June 2025 

The Handicap Principle

We’ve just returned from a ten-week trip to the UK. It’s so good to be home – but while we were away, I did manage a couple of short excursions with my camera (and Miriam).

I was lucky enough to photograph two of the most beautiful brightly coloured birds that we see in the UK. In both cases the birds are the male of the species, while their missus is considerably less colourful, perhaps even dully coloured. The mandarin drake is, thought by many to be, the most exquisitely coloured duck in the world, while Mrs Mandarin, though beautiful in her own way, has plumage that nicely blends in with the riversides and edges of lakes that she frequents. Similarly, Mrs Pheasant pales into insignificance when compared to the vibrant colours of her bloke, the cock pheasant. But not all female birds are less flamboyant than their male counterparts – take the kingfisher for example, the male’s stunning electric blue and orange is matched almost exactly by his consort’s, the ‘queenfisher’.

One might ask why any birds have eye-catching plumage – wouldn’t all birds be safer with dull colours providing camouflage to make them less noticeable to those that would lunch on them? And if there is a good reason for some birds to be so colourful, why particularly the males and why are some, but not all, females brightly coloured too?

All birds (male and female) are interested in self-preservation, as indeed are all animals and people. And so, the starting point is for birds to be coloured in a way that doesn’t attract attention. But birds and animals have an inbuilt desire to reproduce to maintain their species. And to do this, males or females have to pursue a mate.

For most bird types it’s the females that are in charge of rearing chicks and they want to choose the ‘best’ mates. They look for the most virile male they can find, hoping that their chicks will be strong and therefore more likely to survive. So, males have to make sure they look good and that the females will find them attractive. With this in mind, many males evolve into colourful birds. But the brightness of the plumage gives the bird a distinct disadvantage – it’s easily spotted by predators. So, the more attractive it is to females, the more noticeable it is to predators – a bit of a catch-22 situation for the poor male birds. This phenomenon is known as the ‘handicap principle’, a hypothesis proposed by the Israeli biologist, Professor Amotz Zahavi. He suggests that to show its physical prowess, which makes it more attractive to a female, the male will put itself in danger, a sort of message to the female that he’s strong enough not to have to worry about predator threats. It’s a bit like the birds are playing ‘chicken’ - a high-risk policy indeed!

Meanwhile for Mrs Pheasant to rear her brood it is much safer for her to stay out of the spotlight. If she were more flamboyant, she’d be easy meat for a fox. Likewise, Mrs Mandarin would be a sitting duck if she were easily noticeable in her nest.

So, what of the kingfisher’s ‘queen’? How can she afford the risk of being so startling?  She hunts for fish and small critters just like the king himself, but when it comes to nesting, she’s not at all noticeable in her bankside burrow and so can afford the luxury of being the rainbow queen – as WH Auden wrote ‘It was the Rainbow gave thee birth/ And left thee all her lovely hues’. But we still need to understand what benefit she gets from her vivid colouring. It’s hard to believe but actually the bright colours act as camouflage as kingfishers fly above rivers, they blend in with the foliage and are not as noticeable to the fish below the surface of the water. So there she has it – her catch of twenty-two!

2025-03

12th March 2025

One of my favourite Van Gogh paintings is his lovely depiction of deep blue and violet irises in Provence, France. Van Gogh painted this scene during the last year of his life while confined in an asylum. Despite the mental trauma he was experiencing he still had a good eye and as you look at the painting you can almost see the sweet perfumy scent of the flowers. Amongst all the blues and violets there is a lone white – perhaps this was the ‘Vincent’ iris – the failure that didn’t quite fit the mould. He might have thought himself a failure, but history has judged him otherwise and this one painting was bought in 1987 by the Getty Museum of California for more than $50million. [The painting is reproduced here with thanks to Wikipedia]

Wonderful as Van Gogh’s painting is, it’s not quite the same as seeing real-life irises. For no cost at all, one can visit the iris reserve in South Netanya, close to the coast, during February/March (as we did) and see the stunning iridescent purple coastal iris (Iris atropurpurea) - a protected plant (critically endangered) that can only be found on the coastal plain of Israel.

These irises have three large outer petals, and three smaller inner petals, which fold over one another to form a kind of chamber. But not all irises have this type of structure. A day or two after we saw coastal irises, we found some rather beautiful irises of a different kind during an afternoon visit to Mount Arbel. The barbary nut (Gynandriris sisyrinchium) is a dwarf iris and has the Hebrew name - צהרון מצוי = the common tzaharon. At the end of their kindergarten day, our little grandchildren, each of whom is the apple of my (iris) eye, go to an afternoon after school club, known in Hebrew as a tzaharon. The word tzaharon takes its origin from the word tzaharayim - meaning ‘noon’. And the barbary nut – the common tzaharon is so called because its flowers are closed all morning and only open at noon.

Some days I think I too am a bit of a tzaharon.

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As well as the iris photos, I’ve included two birds, that we’re seeing a lot of at the moment. The rather handsome black-headed bird is a male stonechat, and the brown bird with red tail feathers is a female black redstart.

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3rd March 2025

In recent days we have been lucky enough to see two sorts of lupin (US spelling is lupine and Hebrew word is turmus possibly related to the word thermos [= warm, hot]). These two types are the deep blue lupin (Lupinus pilosus) with a white splodge in the middle of its blue petals, and the pale blue and white Israeli lupin (Lupinus  palaestinus). Beautiful as the flowers are, I particularly like to look at the lupin’s wonderful palmate leaves.

You might think me a little loopy, but I must tell you that when I see lupins growing, I do wonder what is lurking beneath them. The Midrash (Gen Rab 79:6) relates that the great second century sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, planted lupin seeds in Tiberias (our hometown) to determine whether the ground below was part of an ancient cemetery. Where there were skeletons below, lupins grew from the seeds – but lupins didn’t grow where there was an absence of bones. And, by the way, I’ve checked – there are no skeletons in my closet.

Lupins are edible and have been eaten for thousands of years – the Talmud (Beitzah 35) states that the leguminous beans are as bitter as can be, but if boiled in water seven times they become sweet and can be wolfed down along with the tastiest of desserts. Though I have to say, rather than turmus for dessert, I think I shall stick with tiramisu.

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Have you ever read H.G Wells’ novel ‘The Invisible Man’? I wonder if he got the idea from the false Apollo butterfly that I wrote about last week. It wasn’t clear from last week’s photo that this amazing little butterfly can be almost as invisible as Wells’ eponymous character. As the butterfly ages its wings become more and more transparent. The elderly butterfly I saw a few days ago at Gamla was barely noticeable as it rested on a yellow flower. It does make you wonder why other critters don’t use this method of camouflage. Well, actually, a few do, including glass frogs, the glass octopus and some jelly fish. Watch out next time you’re swimming in tropical waters.

2025-02

24th February 2025

Ramat Hanadiv, which includes the Rothschild Memorial Gardens and Nature Park next to Zichron Yaakov, is a truly remarkable place for nature lovers. Its 470 hectares is home to 656 species of wild plants - about a quarter of Israel’s plant species - and about a third of all butterfly and mammal species of Israel. It’s certainly one of our favourite haunts and what a metamorphosis we’ve seen over the last couple of months. Not very long ago the fields were dull brown, showing little signs of life. Now they are covered in beautiful flowers, particularly red (and a few purple) crown anemone’s (Anemone coronaria = kalanit in Hebrew) and white Venus’ comb (Scandix verna), which is also known as shepherd’s needle – and one of my favourites, the spectacular Judean viper’s bugloss (Echium judaeum) a member of the borage family (see accompanying photo) – borage rhyming with porridge. The bugloss is named for its style – the tube supporting the stigma - resembling the forked tongue of a serpent.

Last week, on a lovely sunny and warm day, I saw lots and lots of very hungry caterpillars eating all before them. Then I had a brief encounter with a rather beautiful butterfly. The false apollo, which is classified as near-threatened, is so called because it looks a little like, and tries to mimic, the apollo butterfly. And the apollo butterfly is named to reflect its ‘worship’ of the sun – Apollo being the so-called god of the sun. It rests with wings splayed soaking up warmth from the sun. Just before it landed in front of me to do a bit of sunbathing, it hovered above the ground then descended like it was an Apollo Lunar Module floating on to the moon’s surface. A few seconds later it launched itself, orbited me twice and off it went – leaving me to think of its wonderful metamorphosis - egg, caterpillar, pupa and then butterfly.

After a coffee break in the café overlooking the olive grove, I visited one of my favourite froggeries – Ramat Hanadiv’s lily pond. There were lots and lots of little tadpoles, which were probably just as hungry as the caterpillars I had seen earlier. I managed to creep ever so carefully and quietly towards a sun-seeking frog. This little marsh frog, not even half the size of my hand, launched itself downwards to take cover below the lily pads as soon as it saw me – leaving me to think of its wonderful metamorphosis - egg, tadpole, froglet and then adult frog.

What a remarkable place Ramat Hanadiv is, and what a truly remarkable world we live in - a world that has allowed me to metamorphose from a desk-bound British high-tech consultant to a sun-loving Israeli nature-watcher.

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18th February 2025

For various reasons, I haven’t been able to write my blog posts for the last couple of months, but I hope to resume now. And what a lovely time it is to be out and about in the countryside of Israel. The fields are quite a bit greener, flowers are carpeting the hillsides and birds are happily singing. The war situation has changed somewhat too in the last few months and, thank Goodness, some of the hostages have been released from Gaza, albeit at a possibly considerable cost to the future safety of Israel. We hope and pray that all the hostages will be released soon and that our fears for the future will prove unfounded.

I photographed a bird during a winter visit to the Hula Valley – which leads me to ask the following question. Do birds have whiskers? I guess that many people would be surprised to know that indeed, some birds do have whiskers – they’re known as rictal bristles. These bristles or whiskers are thought to aid the bird in assessing its speed. The bird I saw was a tern, the whiskered tern, which is a common winter visitor to Israel, though not as common as the common tern.

In many ways terns are similar to gulls in appearance, but terns are smaller and more agile, having a sharper and more streamlined profile than the stockier gulls. They plunge into the water to capture fish which is their staple diet. Gulls, on the other hand, will eat anything and are particularly fond of ice cream, as my daughter will testify, having lost her ice cream, aged ten, to a large and ravenous gull, which swooped in over her head just as she was about to take the first lick.

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.