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.