2024-01

31st January 2024

On Sunday this week we headed towards the top of Mount Carmel near Haifa, from where there are fabulous views of the city and the Med. There's also a nature reserve, Hai Bar, where various birds and animals that are few in number are bred, and when they're ready to fend for themselves, they are released into the wild. We were hoping to see fire salamanders and Griffon vultures. The salamanders remained well hidden, which wasn't a great surprise to us, as it was a fairly bright day and they prefer dark shady locations. The only time we've encountered salamanders was at Tel Dan in the streams beneath the shade of trees where it's rather dark. But this week we did get to see a group of five or six Griffon vultures that circled high above us. I always think that when there are vultures above it's best not to stay too still, but fortunately, they spotted some sign of life in us and quickly moved on. There were also a few vultures in the breeding enclosure. The two photos are of Griffon vultures, one of them in the enclosure, and one circling above.

On our recent trip to Pulborough Brooks in South of England we were told that there were white-tailed eagles (also known as sea eagles) around, but we didn't see them. But this week we did. There was a pair in an enclosure together with a young one, which in due course will be released

Just as we arrived I received a WhatsApp message from someone who'd been given my number. She wanted to know where is a good place to see Peregrine falcons in Israel. They're actually not so common here and are not seen nearly so frequently as they are in England. That said, I haven't ever seen one - not in England and not in Israel, but I would really like to. They're the fastest bird of all - they can dive on their prey at speeds in excess of 200mph (320km per hour). In fact there is no animal or fish that reaches such speed - cheetahs have a maximum speed of a mere 80mph. Peregrine falcons are particularly fond of rock pigeons. If they only realised what a great supply of pigeon pie there is right outside our window, I'm sure we'd see them very often.

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30th January 2024

The last few days have been quite rainy, but we managed a short walk at Lavi on Friday between showers. The lupins were out (lupinus pilosus) with their lovely deep blue flowers marked with a white vertical bar. Lupins are members of the pea family, so perhaps we could say that the flowers are a pea-blue colour. The long lupin leaves sparkled with rain drops. And a rosemary bush, which is native to the Mediterranean region, was also flowering.

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29th January 2024

I photographed this beautiful red admiral butterfly that was perched on a white fence at the nearby Arbel Nature Reserve. The obvious question to ask is - why does this butterfly, the red admiral (with scientific name Vanessa atalanta), get the rank of Admiral? Does it rule the Atlantic waves? I was surprised to discover that it has no connection at all to the sea. It was originally known as the red admirable, presumably because of its admirable qualities. Subsequently admirable was corrupted to admiral and now everyone calls it the red admiral.

We also admired a black redstart, which funnily enough is a small brown bird, with a red end, and the equally admirable round yellow shrubs, Jerusalem spurge, with which Mount Arbel is currently adorned.

All in all, an admirable day!

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22nd January 2024

Lovely as it was to see the bird life in England over the last few weeks, including, swans, robins and snipe, it’s wonderful to be back home enjoying Israel’s flora and fauna. This time last year we saw the very special purple iris in Netanya, and we wanted to get another look. The weather was idyllic, in stark contrast to the freezing temperatures we endured last week in Northern England. It can’t have been much colder in the Arctic Circle, at least that’s how it felt to us, now that we have become acclimatised to Mediterranean weather. This week in Netanya, we didn’t need sweaters in the 22-degree warmth, and I was glad of my sunhat.

Iris wasn’t home, sadly; I guess we were a week or two too early, so we’ll be back soon. Irises we didn’t see, but our trip wasn’t wasted. There was enough borage (rhymes with porridge and is also known as starflower) so that Goldilocks wouldn’t need to worry who’d been eating hers. Borage is a herb with little blue flowers, that is native to Mediterranean countries. It is sometimes used in salads and apparently tastes a bit like cucumber. There was also a lot of Prunus arabica around, a sort of wild almond (a broom-like shrub), with little white flowers. Miriam tells me it was the delicate perfume (similar to hyacinths) that first alerted her to this shrub. And we had our first sighting of the year of red kalaniyot (crown anemones), Israel’s national flower. Many confuse it with a poppy, but it’s most certainly an anemone.

A young tortoise walked through the undergrowth at a snail’s pace, and a venomous centipede (about 12cm = 4.5 inches long) with a mere 40 legs or so, was sunning itself and was moving at a speed that even snails would find super slow. This banded centipede was the Scolopendra cingulata and though venomous, as are all centipedes, it’s not normally deadly – but nasty just the same. You can see in the photo that alongside its black head are some thin pincers known as forcipules with which they inflict their sting and at t’other end, the final pair of legs, known as the ultimate legs, are pincer-like and are used in both attack and defence.

It’s great to be home and we’re looking forward to seeing lots more throughout 2024. We hope and pray that all the kidnapped hostages and all displaced persons will return home very soon and that there will be a lasting peace.

PS, yesterday I posted pictures of a robin. This was the European robin, somewhat different to the American robin, with which those of you in or from America will be familiar. The European and American robins are not closely related but are both called robin because of their red breasts.

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21st January 2024

In Israel we occasionally see robins, but in England we saw them very frequently in gardens, parks and woods. I photographed this robin in the South of England last week.

Most people perceive the robin as a cheerful friendly bird. And it is just that, unless it thinks that you or other birds or other robins are ‘invading’ its territory, at which point it can become exceedingly aggressive. It’s been known to attack other birds, and even people and it will certainly kill other robins that it regards as a threat. So, I suggest that it probably wasn’t sparrow that killed cock robin, despite sparrow’s confession, but rather another robin, who seems to have got away with murder. Be that as it may, the robin, with its bright red breast, is most certainly the most popular bird in England – it was selected as the UK’s national bird.

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17th January 2024

Here are a few birds photographed on our trip to the South of England, that are all seen in Israel too.

The bird with the very long beak is a snipe, photographed at Pulborough Brooks, an RSPB reserve. The snipe is so well camouflaged that hunters who were able to shoot it were given the title sniper – and that is the origin of the word sniper.

The blackish bird with green flashes and a long black crest is a northern lapwing, which is also known as a pewit or peewit. It might be a peewit, but as we’ve noted before birds are no pea-brains. It’s related to the spur-winged plover, one of my favourite birds in Israel. Also photographed at Pulborough Brooks.

And there are two pictures of herring gulls, one of them is a mature bird (the white one) and the other (the brown one) is a youngster. I photographed these birds on the coast, at Hove near Brighton.

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16th January 2024

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2023

One of the exhibition rooms at the Natural History Museum in Tring (that we visited last week) was dedicated to a display of some of the winning entries in the young people's category of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2023 competition. And fine photographs they were, by very talented young wildlife photographers. The Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2023 was a young Israeli fellow, Carmel Bechler, who photographed two barn owls from quite a distance. Although it’s not to my taste, I can see it’s a great photograph - you can see it here - Carmel Bechler's Photo

At Tring, the display only included the work of young photographers. The adult section is displayed at the museum in London. So, I bought the book of winning entries in the gift shop. I was pleased to see that another Israeli photographer’s photo was the winner of the Animals in their Environment category. This photo is of two Nubian ibexes in the Negev Desert. Amit Eshel's Photo

I didn’t submit any of my photographs to this competition but were I to have done so I would have sent this photograph of a frog at Kibbutz Lavi with inflated vocal sacs.

Occasionally we see frogs on our country walks and more often we hear their loud croaking. The ones we see most frequently are marsh frogs, the biggest frog found in Israel. At the other end of the scale, there is a frog in Israel that is just few in number – the Hula painted frog, which is only found at the Hula Valley, nowhere else in the world. It was thought that this frog had become extinct, but in 2010 it was spotted again. It seems to have reinvented itself (perhaps even been reincarnated). But there are so few around, that even as frequent visitors to the Hula Valley, we’re unlikely to see it – so unfortunately, I haven’t got a photo to share with you.

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15th January 2024

We’re having a lovely time in England visiting family and friends, but we’re really missing Israel and particularly the flora and fauna. However, last week, despite being in England, we saw some familiar sights - a hoopoe, a kingfisher, a crane, storks, ibises, eagles - as well as hundreds more birds and animals. Photographing them was much, much easier than usual – they didn’t move at all. They were at the Natural History Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire (a little market town 30 miles North of London), a branch of the Natural History Museum of London. The collection in Tring was a gift to the Nation from Walter Rothschild, of the well-known family of bankers and philanthropists, one of whom, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, did so much to help establish some of the cities of modern Israel. Walter Rothschild was a keen naturalist from a very young age and collected a huge number of birds, insects and animals. He hired zoologists and taxidermists and established his own museum, which on his death, became part of the Natural History Museum. I have to say, I felt a little uneasy at seeing so many animals and birds preserved in this way. I’m not sure that this is what conservation is all about. Though, in the past animals were killed specifically to be taxidermized, it is to be hoped that these days taxidermy follows more ethical practices and only animals and birds that have already died will be collected for museums.

So, we saw stuffed birds and animals including lions, tigers, elephants and bears. Personally, I’m quite partial to stuffed monkeys, with my coffee, but they’re quite fattening so I’m doing my best to refrain. One of the exhibits was a huge skeleton of a giant sloth from the Pleistocene era (ice age). I was quite amazed to see what you can build with Plasticine if you have enough if it.

The photos include the head of a red kite. In Israel we see black kites, but not red kites. As we’ve been driving around England we’ve seen numerous red kites, but it’s hard to photograph them when driving so it was good to be able to photograph one at the museum. In Israel we see the Egyptian mongoose, also known as the ichneumon (a term not widely used, probably because no-one knows how to say it). In the museum I photographed a white-tailed mongoose, collected by Rothschild’s brother in Sudan.

Two of the most interesting exhibits were a dodo and a next to it a Réunion Island dodo. As everyone knows, for hundreds of years the dodo has been as dead as a dormouse, so the exhibit is a model made with goose and chicken feathers. The Réunion Island dodo is also a model and is based on descriptions and paintings of a white bird that looked like a dodo. Scientists now believe that such a bird didn’t ever exist, but rather the paintings were of the Réunion Island ibis, which, as it happens, is also as dead as a dodo.

I’m so looking forward to seeing some real live Israeli birds, when we return home.

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8th January 2024

These photos are of mute swans – at Roundhay Park Lake and Golden Acre Park Lake in Leeds in England. Mute swans visit Israel only very occasionally. I’m reliably informed that the last sighting in Israel was at least 20 years ago [thank you to the expert, I consulted – Alena Kacal].

A black headed gull (white-headed for the winter) is being ‘hosted’ by a swan in one of the pictures. There’s also a photo of a young swan, a cygnet, with its wings lifted up to dry, over its body making a ring – a cygnet ring. And there’s a photo of a very rare two-headed swan.

In England there are three companies that each ‘own’ a significant number of wild swans. All other swans belong to the Crown, that is to King Charles III. Once a year there’s a special event, known as swan upping, at which all swans on part of the River Thames are rounded up, weighed, measured and checked for injury, before being released again. So, if you’re swanning around the Thames in the middle of July, look out for the upping.

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7th January 2024

A week and a half ago, the day before we travelled to England, I participated in a guided bird walk in the centre of Tel Aviv. Ahead of the walk I didn’t have great expectations (though Dickens probably would have). Whereas it would be wonderful to see eagles or ospreys or bee-eaters, it wasn’t likely that we would see anything so exotic. On previous visits to the city, I’d been lucky enough to see a white-throated kingfisher dive into a lily pond outside the Sarona market and take out a goldfish. I’d also seen jackals and kingfishers and other birds at an urban park in Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, I wasn’t particularly optimistic.

As it turned out, we saw jays, a hoopoe and sunbird, warblers and sparrows, and parakeets (red-ringed and monk). We also saw wagtails (both white and grey).

The photos here are a white wagtail photographed on the walk, together with a pied wagtail that I photographed last year near a river in the Lake District in England. The pied wagtail (also known as water wagtail), the much blacker bird, is a sub-species of the white wagtail. It’s easy to guess why these birds are called wagtails. But the big question is – why do they wag their tales? Several theories have been proposed, but the most likely reason is that they are sending messages to potential predators that they’re alert and able to fly away if attacked.

Some wags might ask this important question – is it the tail that wags the bird, or the bird that wags the tail?

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3rd January 2024

On our way to England last week, we took a little detour and spent a couple of days in Jerusalem, and of course visited Gazelle Valley. The gazelles are living in their natural habitat but are protected by a fence that surrounds the whole valley and are ultimately released into the wild when they’re strong enough to survive.  I’ve written about this wonderful place before and so I won’t repeat all that I’ve said before. If you have a couple of minutes you might like to take a look at my photo essay published by the Times of Israel last year.

It was a cool December morning in Jerusalem (about 16 degrees C) so I wore my Yorkshire Tweed cap. As I got out of the car it occurred to me that if my goal was to photograph gazelles it might have been better to wear a deerstalker, but the gazelles didn’t seem too fussed, and I managed a few photos.

The galloping gazelle is a male – you can see the rings around its horns. The others are females, and you’ll see that one of them has just a single horn.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/nature-of-israel-gazelle-valley/