This Isn't Oman!

 So I stopped off in Kuwait on my way for a month-long sojourn in Oman, with the intention of ticking off Afghan Babbler. Kuwait is the only available place in the Western Palearctic to see this species...

As you can see Kuwait is the only place to see it in the WP. And you don't want to go to Iraq!

I'd been in touch with the main man of Kuwait birding - AbdulRahman Al-Sirhan and he'd given me some pointers. Take a look at his excellent website: www.birdsofkuwait.com  It was just a shame he wasn't in the country at the time of my visit as i'd have liked to have gone birding with him! 

Anyway, after a late arrival at the hotel in Kuwait city last night I'd set my alarm for 6am and when it went off I did have second thoughts about getting up! But after just 3 hours sleep I dragged myself out onto the empty streets, getting a well needed coffee from a petrol station on my hour long drive south. When I reached the semi-desert habitat on the gps I started driving around the area, following some dirt tracks. Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters were noisy and obvious, as were White-eared Bulbuls - and I think the latter must be a Western Palearctic tick. And there it is.... do I do the Classic WP or Greater WP..? At the moment I have no idea and to be honest, i'm not bothered either way! I just enjoy birding, and frequently feel these man-made boundaries are a bit futile.... It's just a bit of fun right..?

Anyway, I kept driving slowly and stopping frequently to listen and scan. Having seen Arabian Babbler and Iraq Babbler, I kind of knew how this species would be behaving and I was looking for a group of long-tailed birds feeding on the ground amidst the low bushes somewhere out here in a quite large, open landscape. I saw 2 female-type Menetries's Warblers quite close in an area of thorny bushes and they seemed really unconcerned by my car and were acting totally out of character by not skulking in the deepest parts of the bushes. Instead, they were working the outside of the bushes and even perching on top of the bushes giving me the opportunity to get some decent photos. It's a very interesting plumage and it was very pleasant to be able to study them at leisure. 

Menetries's Warbler

With the day warming up I left them in peace and followed a network of sandy tracks, picking up Isabelline, several Pied and a few Desert Wheatears along the way, and a pair of Asian Desert Warblers were also very confiding. 

Who doesn't love an Asian Desert Warbler?

But still no babblers. So I went over to the tarmac road and checked out the lush, green lawns thinking any self-respecting babbler would be there. More bee-eaters were on show, about 7 Water Pipits (coutelli) were enjoying the lush lawns and an Isabelline (Daurian) Shrike was perched up nicely. 

Isabelline Shrike

White-eared Bulbul... Possibly a WP tick....?

Driving slowly along the road I had some nice close White-eared Bulbuls and stopped in a shady spot to take a quick pic. Just then I heard a babbler and sure enough a couple were flying towards the trees I was sheltering under... Yes! Result! 

Afghan Babbler baby!

Finally I had nailed Afghan Babbler - and what a sighting. There was a group of 8 birds feeding all around me, but a couple of them posed very nicely and pretty close to my car, so I spent about 20 minutes watching them and getting a really good look at them. I'd begun to get a bit despondent so this felt like a real bonus and was very pleasing. You've got to love that adrenaline rush of nailing a new bird!!!

With that in the bag I headed off to look for a reported Persian Wheatear, but the less said about that the better! So I returned to the hotel for a well earned sleep before hitting the Grand Motel with Mrs B this evening. And i'm already looking forward to heading out early tomorrow for some more general birding...

EGYPT - THE END!

The alarm rings at 5am and I’m away quickly and heading south along the coast road to Hamata Mangroves, some 54kms away. A dirt road takes me from the awful highway to the mangroves and I make several stops to scan and in no time at all pick up a few distant Crab-Plovers (what a great Western Palearctic tick), and I also note several flocks of White-cheeked Terns flying past, along with a few Great Crested Terns, and a couple Sooty Gulls. All good Western Palearctic species but my favourite sighting of the morning is of a Sooty Falcon pursuing a shorebird across the mudflats. 

Hamata Mangroves

There’s also many Western Reef Herons dotted around, flocks of migrating Garganey heading south, Slender-billed Gulls, Caspian Terns, an Osprey and Common Kingfisher as well. Further down the coast I come across a mixed roosting group of White-eyed and Sooty Gulls, which allow me to get quite close and take some decent photos. The same spot produces another Crab-Plover but this one is much closer here.

Mainly White-eyed but there's Sooty Gull as well.

Crab-Plover

So buoyed by these great sightings I decide to begin the long drive south to Shalateen – the only reliable site in the entire WP for Lappet-faced Vulture. However, the local police had something to say about this and another bullshit & bollocks reason was given at the first checkpoint to halt my journey. So I had to turn back, leaving me feeling very frustrated. So I return to the mangroves, finding more Crab-Plovers than before and wade across a channel to try and get closer to them but no matter how much I think I hide amongst the mangroves, the birds know I’m there and I just can’t get any closer. So then I try driving a back road near Wadi El Gemal where some lappets had been seen back in April but the road is very old and in ruin and after about 10kms I chicken out and head back to the hotel for lunch. And that was pretty much my birding done and dusted in Egypt. I spend the evening feeling frustrated at the poor wifi, and our initial impressions of what a good resort this is have started to fade…. Being an all-inclusive resort means the food is very reminiscent of what I had for school meals all those years ago! Being the only Brits at an Italian-run resort does make us stand out, not least due to the weird and wonderful dress sense of the other 1,000+ guests, most of whom must have bought their clothes at an 80’s charity shop!!! There are weird rules about getting towels to use around the pool, I have another run-in with a room attendant who insists that he needs to know who is staying in my room when I don’t allow him to enter, and finally the electric cart fails to arrive to collect our luggage for check-out and we have to haul everything back to the car, which is parked quite some distance away. The journey back to Luxor is uneventful and I drop the rental car off and we head into the airport to face the security checks etc. it wasn’t too bad but I was told to put my binoculars in hold luggage – and that was it. Oh, the plane left very late and boarding was a chaotic scrum – hardly surprising really!

Upon arrival in Cairo we’d booked an airport hotel via booking.com, which stated was 1km away. Turns out this was a lie and the hotel was beside the pyramids, some 40 minutes away and was basically 2 rooms on the 5^thfloor of a more or less abandoned building. Driving through back streets full of rubbish, donkeys, and a few men fighting at 11pm at night was a little unsettling. The alleged shuttle bus service was an old, beaten up saloon car and we had to have our suitcases on our laps and by the time we eventually got to the right place and into our rooms, we were all ready to cry! I asked for towels as we were in desperate need of a shower and was given a small hand towel and then forced to pay for a return taxi to the airport at 6.30am the following morning. And in the morning we had to pay more money as the hotel (and I use that term extremely loosely) guy had lied last night about the price and instead of a ‘big’ car we had the same saloon car as last night. And yes, suitcases on our laps again! Oh and there wasn’t a restaurant for breakfast as their advert suggested on booking.com. WTAF! Safe to say we were all relieved when the plane left Cairo (not on time I hasten to add) and we finally got home feeling like a shadow of our former selves! 

Footnote – 10 days later I am still poorly with an, as yet, undiagnosed virus and staring down the barrel of a month away in Oman looming on the horizon....

Heading to the Red Sea

Couldn’t raise myself to go out early this morning and thoroughly enjoyed sleeping in. After breakfast we are back on the road for another 3 hour drive up to Aswan, followed by another 3 hours or so further north to the wonderful Jolie Ville resort on Kings Island, Luxor. Got done by the corrupt police again along the way and had to pay EGY200 for some bullshit reason. I may have been done for speeding or it was just a ‘tourist tax’ but either way the policeman was rude, ignorant and aggressive and it’s the same checkpoint I ‘got done’ at on the drive down. Anyway, it’s around 4pm by the time we arrive here and I’m ready for a late lunch or an early dinner beside the pool, whatever really, (there’s nowhere on these long drives to get anything to eat) and I crash out back in the room soon after and wake up at 8am the following morning! I think this is the start of some bug that’s going to linger for weeks and weeks (Pharaoh’s Revenge I call it).

Jolie Ville Resort

It was a shame we had to leave here really but another loooong 6+ hours drive lay ahead to the Red Sea coast. The beginning of the journey didn’t get off to a good start as the super new highway we were on was blocked by police and of course there aren’t any diversion signs, but fortunately there was a tourist bus in front of us and I assumed they were heading to the coast so I followed them for many miles until we eventually saw a sign for Safaga. Now, this route was the 4th or 5th option we were aware of to get to the Red Sea, as each one further south was allegedly/apparently closed for some reason, which ranged from “it’s too rough to drive on” to “it’s closed by the police due to illegal gold miners and it’s not safe”…… Hmmmm…. So we’re heading ever northwards and we weren’t that far south of Hurghada in the end, as we had an appointment with a Sixt Rental Car guy who was due to meet us in this rundown town to exchange our car as we had a metre long crack in the windscreen. Now here’s a word of warning - no amount of insurance covers you for windscreen or tyre damage in Egypt with rental cars! Anyway, as we approached this delightful town, the Sixt rep ‘WhatsApped’ me to say they were charging USD$700 for replacement windscreen. WTAF! We’d already been in touch with a company who would do it for half that cost, so what ensued was a tense stand off as the Sixt guy had tracked us down due to the tracking device in our rental car and we spend nearly 2 hours arguing via WhatsApp with some faceless individual on text. Anyway, blah blah blah boring I was keen to head off as it was past 3pm now and we still had over 3 hours to get to the resort waaay south. So the upshot is we kept the same car, metre-long windscreen crack and all and hurtled down the coast road. 

The highway from Luxor to here had been good but we were now on the usual shitty road, with random massive pot holes and even more random concrete or tarmac humps appearing just to annoy drivers. Sometimes it seemed we were on a sort of dual carriageway, and other times we definitely weren't - there just weren't any roadsigns to tell you the score! Another thing that endears me to Egypt! I did wonder how the ancient Egyptians had made such phenomenal Pyramids that were geometrically perfect, aligned with the stars and wind direction etc etc when you can’t even get a smooth road here in 2025…?!  

So it was a bit torturous, passing through numerous police checkpoints, as we had done every road we’d travelled on. Some stopped us, others just glared at us for some reason but finally after what had turned out to be an 8 hour plus journey, we reached the Gorgonia Beach Resort just as it got dark at 6.30pm. This is a massive complex and once we’d checked in, I parked the car about 3 miles away and hitched a ride on an electric buggy, and we sped off to our rooms about 15 miles away at the far end of the complex. Even the buggy driver got lost for a minute! And boy it was much more humid here. Everywhere else in Egypt had been a dry heat, so this was a shock to us. So I saw no point in showering before the hike to the restaurant, but the food was possibly the best we’d experienced on the trip so far and then I ended up making a plan to set my alarm clock for 5am and head 45 minutes down the coast to Hamata Mangroves and an attempt to find Crab-Plover…. Goodnight!

Abu Simbel

Out before first light and heading 40 minutes to an area that has been good for Kittlitz’s Plover this year. A barely discernible old tarmac road leads 10 kms out into the middle of nowhere, the ‘road’ covered in many places by sand. I’m wishing I had the SUV I’d booked right about now! 

Yep, definitely a road here somewhere....

Still, I’m able to negotiate my way across the desert and the end of the road takes me to the shores of Lake Nasser. As soon as I arrive I can see several large white birds at the water’s edge and sure enough, they are Yellow-billed Storks…. One of my most wanted Western Palearctic ticks and there’s four of them! 

Lake Nasser

Yellow-billed Stork

I fire off a few shots from the safety of my air-conditioned car before getting out into the heat. The birds seem wary and I walk at a tangent to get the sun behind me but the birds stir and look even more agitated so I walk away from them and begin scanning the shoreline for any plovers and sure enough, there’s plenty of plovers. Lots and lots of Common Ringed Plovers, a few Little Ringed Plovers, Little Stints, Marsh Sandpiper and 2 Greater Sand Plovers. But no Kittlitz’s Plovers. 

Yellow-billed Storks

Walking further parallel to the shoreline reveals more of the same, so I decide to change tact and retrace my steps back to the car. The storks are still in attendance and I head around to the next bay, but there’s no KP’s here apparently. This is meant to be THE spot so I hang around for a while and just enjoy the scene around me and get rewarded with 2 Reed Cormorants fishing out on the lake behind the storks. Wow! A little distant but there they are…! Get in! And I also stumble across a group of 7 Cream-coloured Coursers here as well.

Reed Cormorants

Always nice to see Cream-coloured Courser

I jump back in the car and retrace my steps along that horrid road to another part of the lake. This requires a longer walk to reach the lake and as it’s now 9am, the temperature has soared to 41 °C. Along the shoreline I run the gauntlet of Spur-winged Lapwings and Black-winged Stilts standing on alert. There’s a few stints and Common Ringed Plovers around and they take flight when the lapwings start calling. Just a little further along I see a few small shorebirds but they are also stints…. Until another bird appears from behind some short vegetation and it has a noticeable supercilium. Wow, it’s a Kittlitz’s Plover.

 

It's the best I could do with the plover...

Pure elation sets in and I fire off a few shots but in the haze they won’t come out well I know.  I sit down on the dried mud and hope the bird comes closer but it doesn’t, so after maybe 20 minutes the bird gets spooked by what looked like a Sooty Falcon flying by but I didn’t get enough on it to be sure. Shall I go back to the car or keep looking….? I’m enjoying the birding so keep on walking around to the next bay, where amazingly I stumble upon a roosting group of Kittlitz’s Plovers in a small marshy area. 

That's a lot of Kittlitz's Plovers..!!

There’s a deep water-filled channel between me and the birds, who are about 40m away so I crouch down as I don’t want to spook them. First, I count 8, then scan again and count 12, and again I count 16. Unbelievable, and there’s a couple of spanking summer-plumage birds here as well. It’s impossible to get decent photos in the heat haze so I leave but make one last scan and spot another lone Kittlitz’s out in the bay, making 17 in total. Wow again! So I leave them all in peace and the walk back to the car is long and hot but I don’t care. That’s 3 out of 6 targets seen so far.

More views of Lake Nasser

Buoyed by my success I decide to head over to the waxbill spot again and my luck is truly in as within a few minutes of my arrival a Village Weaver flies across in front of me. I watch it fly into a mid-distant fruiting palm tree and as I try and get closer I can see several weaver nests… They aren’t finished but look quite fresh yet I can’t spot any weavers amongst the throng of House Sparrows feeding on the fresh palm fruits. Still, it’s been quite a morning and by now it’s nearly midday, so I return to the resort for lunch, a siesta and then head over to Abu Simbel Temple for the last hour it’s open. And it’s a superb place and wonderful experience as this late in the day there’s hardly anyone there. In fact, this is a must-visit site and depending on your viewpoint, far exceeds the Pyramids & Sphinx in my opinion. 

Abu Simbel

Anyway, the sun has got to me by now and I’m shattered so retire to the pool for a dip and cold beer or three!

Change of Plans...

Wasn’t expecting to be driving down to Abu Simbel today, you see I’d learned that both of the roads to the Red Sea coast are closed. The only way to get to the coast is the road just north from Luxor, so I managed to change my hotel bookings and was now on my way to Abu Simbel. The downside is that I won’t have a guide as Ismael can’t make these new dates, so I’m on my own. So nothing new there!

Anyway, the road trip should take just over 3 hours and the first section is horrid, bumpy, uneven and I’m hating the fact we haven’t got an SUV. But all of a sudden we get onto a new road and speed south for a good couple hundred kilometres. Time passes quickly and once we get to about 70kms from Abu Simbel the road reverts to the normal awfulness. I think the road builders obviously got bored at this point! Anyway, we reach the Seti Abu Simbel Resort and everything is great. No hassle from the staff, no begging for tips… The rooms are lovely but I’m shattered and fall asleep on the bed. Waking with a start at 4.30pm I’m up and out in double-quick time and set off just 20 minutes to the Crimson-rumped Waxbill site. 

Boy it’s hot and there’s no waxbills or Village Weavers around, although an Eurasian Hoopoe, several close Clamorous Reed Warblers, and some martins flying around that confuse me as they look like Plain Martins… So I return to the hotel, tail between my legs, feeling a bit down and will make a plan for tomorrow…

Sunset at the resort...

Aswan

So yesterday we drove to Aswan and along the way had to pay a policeman to go through a security checkpoint! There was no apparent reason for it, as to this point the ‘highway’ had been very poor and there was no way I had been speeding. Initially he wanted 300 Egyptian Pounds (only about £5) just from me, but then he indicated that each of us should the same, and then I became annoyed and told him to go away and drove off!! The rest of the day was uneventful and we reached the Zen Wellness Resort in the mid afternoon. It’s a seemingly nice place, quite a way out of downtown Aswan and we had to take an electric buggy to our rooms, some distance away…. But it’s ok, with views of the Nile etc.

This morning, I had arranged a boat trip with Ismael Khalifa of Aswan Birding, so after a 6.30am pickup and 30 minute drive into Aswan, we boarded a boat and headed north up the Nile at first and then swung over to the west bank where a huge number of Squacco Herons, many Purple Herons and stacks of common species were present. 

I've never seen so many Squacco Herons in one place before.....

I was particularly hoping to get better views of Greater Painted Snipe, and I certainly did as we found a male preening in a marshy field beside the river, where I took some half decent photos.

 

Greater Painted Snipe was probably my most wanted WP tick on this trip

The early morning light was stunning and it proved to be a very nice few hours, with close Gull-billed Terns, many Ferruginous Ducks, Spotted Redshanks, Wood Sandpipers, Common Moorhens etc. On the riverbank we saw many African Green Bee-eaters, both Red-backed & Woodchat Shrikes, Brown-necked Raven, and a fine Black-winged Kite.

The Nile....

More Squacco Herons

The local race of Barn Swallow (savignii) has red underparts

There were so many Ferruginous Ducks on the Nile as well

Garganey were present in reasonable numbers as well

Gull-billed Tern

Spotted Redshanks had just started to pass through on migration

A few African Swamphens were always slightly obscured or had a reed stem or grass in front of them, until we had one bird right out in the open towards the end of the cruise. 

African Swamphen...... sadly lumped in Western Swamphen for the time being...

The Nile this morning 

As we sailed downriver we passed a flowering Acacia and found at least 3 Nile Valley Sunbirds (WP tick) feeding, and we followed this with a few close Senegal Thick-knees roosting in the shade on some large rocks mid-river. We moored up for a break and had some tea and biscuits, and this was where a Little Bittern flew by and a group of Red Avadavats(WP tick) flew over calling. 

Nile Valley Sunbird

Much better views of Senegal Thick-Knee today

So by now it was mid morning and time to head inland to search for Three-banded Plover, a few of which breed in Egypt. Driving for a good half an hour took us to some small pools in a shallow wadi where the birds have been hanging out, but most were dry. I had high hopes of seeing this much-wanted species but luck didn’t seem to be with us, as we were kicked out of the area by some surly army people and had to leave the area immediately! And that was that. I was feeling very annoyed right now and decided to return to the hotel early as we’d seen everything (bar the plover) that I wanted. Ismael proved to be an excellent guide and very knowledgeable about birdwatching in Egypt, and it was at this point that I discovered our planned route towards the Red Sea tomorrow was closed and we would have to make a massive detour of something like 10 hours to reach our next hotel. So I spent the afternoon frantically trying to rearrange our ‘holiday’ but this would mean I couldn’t meet up with Ismael again in Abu Simbel as we’d previously arranged and I feared this would seriously impact my chances of success….