Getting to Egypt

A last minute change of plan sees me heading to Cairo with Mrs B, with an intention to check out the birding sites, meet some guides and have a stab at some really cool Western Palearctic megas! But first the airport and the main thing that scares most birders from visiting - getting your optics confiscated at the airport when you arrive. With that in mind I had arranged some help, and after getting our visas on arrival, which was ridiculously quick & easy, we are met by a local Mr Fixit at Baggage Claim and whisked out of the airport pretty quickly. No checks, no hassle, nothing! In fact it was one of the quickest journeys through an airport I have ever experienced. We hop straight into a private van and drive half an hour to a fantastic hotel somewhere in downtown Cairo along the banks of the Nile. It's pretty late by now, due to Egypt Air arriving nearly 2 hours beyond their scheduled arrival time but it doesn't matter. We are here, in what appears to be a city that never sleeps! There’s 25 million people living in the vast, sprawling metropolis that is Cairo and from our balcony the noise is incredible. Despite being nearly 2am it’s time for a beer and to wind down… with the bars here open to 4am it shouldn’t be a problem!

New Western Palearctic Birding Website

Following on from my recent ramblings and musings about Western Palearctic Birding I think this might be a good time to go public with something i've been working on.... I run the Zoothera Birding and Oman Birding websites solo and have now begun work on a brand new website, which is all about birding in the WP: www.westernpalearcticbirding.com  

My idea is to create as much information as possible about all things WP:

a] Latest Rarity News

b] Country Profiles with links to birding tours from all companies, local guides and top sites to visit

c] A gallery with rare bird photos

d] Identification papers

e] News from the Greater Western Palearctic

f] Where to see the rare WP species

g] I'd like to post links to the various relevant blogs

And here's the thing.... It is a mammoth job and I need help! I'm looking for contributors to write articles, provide photos, links for i.d articles, magazine links, provide latest news, and anything at all that could help. My vision would be to make this a birding community-based website with contributions from as many people as possible. I've been told that is rather naive as there would be too many egos involved! So am I wrong....?  I'd like to think that isn't the case.....

So, if you would like to be involved please send me an email to: birders@westernpalearcticbirding.com

Lammergeier and Cinereous Vulture

Grey-necked Bunting is a sought-after WP species

Western Palearctic Birding.... Time to Do it...?

 So what is this all about....? Western Palearctic birding.... What is it that drives birders to seek out all the birds in this man-made boundary? As someone who has birded all around the world,  admittedly as part of my job as a tour leader, I seem to be swept up in a wave of enthusiasm for this concept. What I mean by that is, having conducted a number of tours in Turkey where I met quite a few keen WP listers I may have caught the bug! Is that the right word? I've always had that twitching instinct and I used to be a very keen UK lister (admittedly up until the point I became a tour leader) and have always got a kick finding/seeing birds out of range. For instance, I took my group to see a Greater White-fronted Goose near Point Pelee, Canada once and got an adrenaline rush! We also saw a Ruff on the same trip and that was really cool too. I found or was involved in finding 5 new birds in The Gambia, the 1st Naumann's Thrush in Kazakhstan, the 8th (I think) Steppe Grey Shrike in Israel, and there's been others I can't think of right now. Oh and let's not forget all those rare birds from Oman. The point i'm making is that there's degrees upon degrees in birding. Our motivations fluctuate. We keep garden lists, local patch lists, year lists, county lists... and so it goes on.... So why not the WP. And alongside that there's the choice of increasing the interest to The Greater Western Palearctic - or not... And to be honest i'm not sure about that one. 

Anyway, on a personal note my WP list is poor (667) and my GWP list not much better (791). And until relatively recently I was not interested/bothered in my own lists. By way of my job I have built up a moderately decent Life List of 7,557. And until my heart attack in August 2024 I was going to reach 8,000 inside a couple of years. But i'm not really bothered now about the 8K and my obsession with Oman Birding has been the major motivating factor in my birding. And this is where WP birding comes in. It may be a desire to increase my own WP list or it may be something inbuilt inside myself to be relevant or it may be just about understanding that WP craving of others. Or maybe it's a little bit of each? Whatever it is, the bottom line is I just love birding and this is all something sort of new but with shorter flights!!

So for Zoothera Birding we've got incredibly popular tours to Turkey, which we've done for a while now. And there's Egypt, Jordan & West Kazakhstan, that are heading the same way too. And there's quite a few more trips i'm planning in the Western Palearctic region in the future, so I wonder where this is taking us...

Can't even remember seeing Cinereous Vulture in the Western Palearctic!!!!

Definitely haven't seen Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse in the WP. Gotta go to Egypt for that.

I have seen Yellow-browed Bunting on the scillies. Time to get out there and get that list moving...