2025-09

3rd September 2025

It’s now September; the days are a wee bit less hot and so my prolonged period of torpor is over. We have had a spell of quite warm weather recently, with temperatures in Tiberias peaking at 46 degrees Centigrade, which is about 115 Fahrenheit. It’s not surprising that we spent the last few months estivating. It wasn’t just us that kept a low profile – birds and animals didn’t show their faces and even the summer flowers cowered in the intense heat, while seeking out shade.

Last week we headed up into the mountains above Tiberias on the eastern side of the lake. Our favourite place there is Gamla and with school holidays more or less over, it was very quiet. Gamla is the site of an ancient fortress and is sometimes called the “Masada of the North”. Here it was that the Jewish stronghold held out for two months in the year 67 against the Romans (led by Vespasian), before ultimately falling, as recounted in Flavius Josephus’ great work of history – The Jewish War.

These days, Gamla is a place of tranquillity enjoyed by nature lovers, hikers and the local birds and animals. Within just a few minutes of arriving, we were treated to the fly past of a pair of magnificent griffon vultures. This huge bird (with wingspan of almost three metres) was all but extinct in Israel until recent decades but conservationists have worked hard to reintroduce them. One of the prime locations for this project has been the mountains around Gamla, where the birds benefit from the thermals that help them rise effortlessly in the afternoon sun.

Another major conservation project in Israel is to enable mountain gazelles to flourish. These gazelles were almost extinct too, but through the efforts of Israeli conservationists, the world population of mountain gazelles has now reached several hundred. We hit lucky – just a short way into our walk, a family of four gazelles trotted by. They were a bit too far away to get a good photo, but I did manage to get a shot of one of them through the trees. A few months ago, I got even luckier. We were about to cross a wooden bridge over the stream and encountered a gazelle wanting to cross the bridge too – in the opposite direction to us. Feeble old folk like us need to make use of such bridges, but one would have expected the gazelle to easily cope with descending the banks of the stream and coming up on the other side without resorting to this man-made contraption. But it was either a lazy gazelle, or perhaps a smart gazelle and figured it easier to use the bridge. I think it got a bit of a surprise when it saw us already there – and after eyeing us up for almost a full minute it decided to look for an alternative route.

If you’re interested in gazelle gazing, try Gamla – you might be lucky, as we were. But more likely by far, you’ll see them in Jerusalem’s Gazelle Valley. I wrote about this inner-city nature reserve a year or two ago – if you’d like to know more you can find my article here - https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/nature-of-israel-gazelle-valley/.