OMAN DAY 5: BARR AL HICKMAN

We headed to the waderfest that is Barr Al Hickman Area 4 at 5.30am which entailed driving across the potentially wet desert (also known as sabkha) on some semi-visible tracks. This whole area is a Ramsar Site and protects a huge population of shorebirds and other ‘water’ birds that must total well over half a million birds in total, if not more! On the drive from the hotel we had to slow right down due to a thick mist reducing visibility to just a few metres and I was wondering if it would be possible to actually reach my intended site. Well, I needn’t have worried as the mist soon began to dissipate once the sun was up and we got closer to the shore. It’s always an incredible sight to see so many birds at one time and wherever we looked there was a constant movement of shorebirds feeding. The tide was coming in slowly and I mean slowly – in fact with only a 65cms difference between low and high tides I was expecting it to move far quicker than it did. I’m sure some of us were wondering why we’d got here so early as high tide wasn’t until shortly after 11am but in such a fantastic area you just never know what to expect and there’s always the chance of a rarity in the strip of bushes that goes on for many kilometres. And you wouldn’t believe how hot and sultry it was by 11am!!! Yes, we saw a few more Crab-Plovers but they were still quite distant and we did manage to find a lone Great Knot as well, but probably our best experience was with a close group of 7 Broad-billed Sandpipers feeding close in front of us. We watched them for ages as they scuttled first to our left before backtracking right and exploring the numerous puddles spread across the mudflats. It was a fantastic experience to watch them and note their distinctive feeding behaviour and we then scanned across the vast mudflats picking out over a hundred in one scan!

Some phonescoped efforts at Broad-billed Sandpipers

Many thousands of shorebirds, egrets, herons were present including many hundreds of Western Reef Herons, 250+ Eurasian Spoonbills, 1000’s of Dunlins, 200+ Red-necked Phalaropes dotted the shoreline, 2000+ Tibetan Sandplovers, 3,500 Greater Sandplovers,  50+ Terek Sandpipers, 1200+ Greater Flamingo’s etc. You get the picture. In fact it is impossible to give any sort of accurate counts as there’s just so many birds and everything would take flight when a harrier flew over, which they did quite frequently. The fact I found Oman’s 1^st Grey-tailed Tattler here a few years ago just shows what could be out there somewhere…. We also had 2 Short-toed Lark types flyby, that could well have been Turkestan Short-toed Larks. But boy it was hot. In the bushes we saw several Asian Desert Warblers, Lesser Whitethroat & Eurasian Cuckoo, with several Western Marsh Harriers also present. 

 

It was apparent that the Crab-Plovers weren’t roosting in their usual spot so we headed across to Shannah and checked out the beaches there, incredibly finding a Pin-tailed Snipe hiding in the shade from a plastic barrel on the beach! And with sunburnt faces we headed back to the hotel for lunch and a rest. 

 

After a rest back at the hotel we drove to Mahout Sewage Works on the outskirts of the town. Initially everything seemed a little quiet, with just the usual shorebirds such as Tibetan Sandplovers, Little Stints and a few Dunlins present. But we then picked up 3 Wood Sandpipers, Les saw a Red-throated Pipit, and I was amazed to see a Black-necked Grebe in one of the flooded pools. 

Some KP's at the sewage pools

Black-necked Grebe

More shorebirds... 

Brian then shouted ‘pratincole’ and a juvenile flew around the pools before disappearing – probably a Collared Pratincole… There was also Western Yellow Wagtail, Desert Wheatear, Eurasian Curlew, Ruff, Common Coot, Greater Flamingo and others. 

 

It had been quite a day.