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Trip report: “Champions of the Flyway” - a bird race for

conservation in southern Israel – March 2015

By Chris Lotz

Hume's or Desert Tawny Owl (Strix [butleri or hadorami]) in the Judean Desert two days

prior to the bird race. Image courtesy of Jim Lawrence, BirdLife International. Strix

hadorami has only very recently been described to science (Kirwan, Schweizer & Copete,

2015), too recently for most authorities to recognize it yet. Bizarrely, there is now evidence it

could be close to African Wood Owl, to which it sounds very similar.

Background

The Champions of the Flyway is a mega-exciting 24-hour bird race (midnight to midnight on

25 March 2015), during which a bunch of teams (32 this year) compete to try and find the

largest number of bird species in a single day. The playing field is southern Israel, from Eilat

on the shores of the Red Sea northwards towards the Dead Sea and then west towards the

Mediterranean, as shown on this map. From the southern point of the race area, at Eilat, four

countries are visible – Israel itself, and then also Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. The

rugged walls of the Jordan Rift Valley tower above each side of Eilat. This is an exciting

meeting point of three continents: standing in Asia, we’re within kilometers of Africa, and

very close to Europe as well. This is a convenient land bridge for birds to migrate across en

route between Africa and Eurasia twice a year.

Some great desert birds such as Hooded and White-crowned Wheatears, and a spectacular

number of overflying birds of prey (brown eagles, buzzards, kites, harriers, sparrowhawks,

and others), storks (Black and White Storks), and more can be found above the mountainous

walls of the Jordan Rift Valley, which extends through Israel, Jordan, and Palestine.

James Curry of Birding Adventures TV was in Israel to film this epic bird race.

The three of us from the Birding Ecotours/South Africa team, at North Beach on the northern

Red Sea, Eilat – also doing our bit for another conservation cause – “Save our Flufftails”:

Birdlife South Africa has an ongoing project on the critically endangered White-winged

Flufftail, which seemingly migrates between South Africa and its Ethiopian breeding

grounds.

The Champions of the Flyway is not just for fun (although that it is!): the express aim of the

2015 race just completed was to raise funds to help stop the large-scale massacre of migrant

birds on the island of Cyprus, which they visit on transit while they fly between Africa and

Eurasia (see http://birdingecotours.com/the-champions-of-the-flyway-project-because-it-is-

personal/ for details about the voluminous slaughter of birds, both big and small, on this

island).

Preparation, fundraising, and the build-up of excitement, January to March 2015

Our friends Meidad Goren and Jonathan Meyrav had been getting us excited about this epic

race for well over a year (it all began at the 2013 British Birdfair, in fact), but finally (in early

2015) we had the honor of actually being invited to participate in the event! We, the South

African/Birding Ecotours team, were to be the only southern hemisphere team to take part in

this incredible bird race! We spent the next couple of months cramming – stacks of Middle

Eastern birds to learn! And we used social media, Trevor’s southern African rare bird alert,

the Birding Ecotours website, and our contacts to try and raise sponsorship for our team –

ultimately to be donated to BirdLife Cyprus. We are absolutely delighted to announce that the

South African team was often right at the top of the fundraising game, far exceeding our

£3000 target and actually collecting well over £4000 for bird conservation, thanks entirely to

our generous supporters, all shown below up to the end of March (when this report was

written) - please note that you can still go to https://www.justgiving.com/COTF-birding-

ecotours/ and donate now, though – the birds very much need your help! We were neck-and-

neck with two other teams in our fundraising endeavors – the three teams always being near

the very top, generating some healthy rivalry that ultimately saw the birds getting more help

than they would have otherwise. Only the Dutch Knights and the Birdwatch/Birdguides

Roadrunners eventually ended up raising more money than we did. South Africans, along

with our fans from other parts of the world, did us very, very proud. Thank you!

Specifically, we’d like to thank each and every one of you shown at the end of this document.

Fundraising Summary: 144% of target

Total: £4,325.06 raised of £3,000.00 target (as of 29 March 2015)

147 donations

The Eurasian Eagle-Owl near the airport in Tel Aviv

Pre-race scouting, 20 March

After touching down in Tel Aviv on the early morning and collecting our rental vehicle we

went to a stakeout near the airport for Eurasian Eagle-Owl (the gen was provided by our

friend Oz Horine), which Jason quite quickly located sitting on the walls of the quarry. We

also found numerous other good birds such as our first of many awesome Sylvia warblers,

Eastern Orphean Warbler. We then headed to Jerusalem, where we had a quick look at the

old city, before continuing to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth (423 meters – 1388 feet

- below sea level!). Jason decided to float on the very salty waters (34 % salt!), while Trevor

and Chris just waded in. Around the Dead Sea we found some good birds, such as

Tristram’s Starling, Fan-tailed Raven, and Desert Lark. An hour or so before dark we

found ourselves only about 50 km north of our destination (Eilat), and we met up with Oz

Horine (at Yotvata, a place we’d get to know rather well in the next few days). Here we

birded a little with Oz before eventually joining an Eilat Birding Festival

(http://www.birds.org.il/en/event-page.aspx?eventId=73) group to see Egyptian Nightjar

(which we eventually got great views and photos of), also finding desert hedgehog in the

process! Eventually, well after dark and rather exhausted after all the travels, we reached

picturesque Eilat (our base for the next few days of scouting as well as for the bird race

itself).

Egyptian Nightjar (Jason Boyce)

Pre-race scouting, 21 March

Today we learned many of the sites close to Eilat, starting at Holland Park with Oz Horine

again. This is a brilliant wadi (dry river bed) bordering on Eilat, which is full of wonderful

old world warblers (the three most abundant being Lesser White-throat, Common

Chiffchaff, and Eastern Bonelli’s Warbler, but also with a few other very good ones

thrown in, such as Rüppell’s, Sardinian, and Subalpine Warblers). There were also good

numbers of other high-quality species, such as Bluethroat, Sand Partridge, Arabian

Babbler, etc. After birding this fine site we had a quick breakfast before heading into the

mountains to look for overflying raptors (we found some good species, such as Lesser

Spotted Eagle, Booted Eagle, Short-toed Snake Eagle, and many others). Two nice

Wheatears showed well – Hooded and White-crowned. And it was good to meet the first

of many fellow birders – Ben MacDonald from Bristol and also the Cape May Bird

Observatory American Dippers team further up in the mountains. Throughout the day we also

familiarized ourselves with other birding sites, including Km (kilometer) 19 and 20 (along

highway 90 to the north) and the birdwatching/ringing centre, gradually adding new birds to

our list and accumulating lifers along the way! We each got over 40 life birds while we were

in Israel, in fact!

Rüppell’s Warbler– these pink-flowered bushes were crawling with Sylvia warblers! (Jason

Boyce)

Pre-race scouting, 22 March

We continued birding around Eilat. One of the real highlights was Arabian Warbler

marginally south of the now very familiar Yotvata – thanks to Meidad Goren. Meidad’s

biggish group of Eilat birding festival folks were very kind to accommodate us – we arrived

just as they had found the bird – as we literally jumped out of our rental car and ran to the

group, saw the bird, and left almost as soon as we had arrived. Sometimes we sit and enjoy

the birds we see, but this was not the time, as we still had tons of scouting to do (including a

6:10 p.m. “date” with Lichtenstein’s Sandgrouse). We had lots to accomplish before the big

day of the race, which we were getting increasingly nervous about. Nervous excitement

mounted!

Pre-race scouting and spectacular owl/nightjar tour, 23 March

This was a big day (and a bit), starting at 3:00 a.m. and ending the following day just before

1:00 a.m.! We headed far to the northwest, all the way to Nizanna, where we picked up

Macqueen’s Bustard (displaying – very, very spectacular!), Pin-tailed Sandgrouse, and a

big stack of other mega-amazing birds – all found with the kind help of Meidad Goren. With

a great many new birds under our belt we headed back to Eilat to prepare for our owl tour,

starting at 3:00 p.m. Hadoram Shirihai accompanied us – the owl we were about to look for

was actually named after him, Strix hadorami (Desert Tawny Owl). One of the leading

pelagic bird specialists on the planet, Hadoram has also made a huge mark on his home front

- the Israeli birding scene in general. We were in no ways disappointed, and it was great to

see Hadoram himself genuinely spectacularly excited – the views we got of Desert Tawny

Owl here in the Judean Desert were perhaps the best even the man himself had ever obtained!

“Oh, what a night.

Late March back in 2015.

What a very special time for me,

'Cause I remember what a night

Oh, what a night.

You know, I didn't even know the owl’s name,

But I was never gonna be the same.

What an owl. What a night”.

– we should all have sung this Frankie Vallie song (but were too tired, I guess, and had

another MEGA bird to find).

Somewhere in the Judean Desert just above the Dead Sea….waiting for the owl to appear on

the edge of the cliff face below us…! Photo by Jim Lawrence, BirdLife International

After obtaining brilliant views of Desert Tawny Owl we headed southwards back towards

Eilat to look for Nubian Nightjar near the southern edge of the Dead Sea. After getting great

views of this rare bird we eventually returned to Eilat close to 1:00 a.m.

Nubian Nightjar by Jim Lawrence, BirdLife International

(Very last-minute) scouting the day before the race, 24 March

We found quite a number of new trip birds today, and all the teams and organizers also met

for a couple of hours to discuss the plan for the big day and to agree on the final bird list to

use. We sat down with Itai Shanni (see http://eilatbirding.blogspot.com/), who helped

immensely. And we frequently pestered Jonathan Meyrav for information today and

throughout our time in Israel.

25 March 2015 – the actual Champions of the Flyway Bird Race

On 24 March we ate an early, quick dinner and then headed to bed soon after 8:00 p.m.,

setting our alarms for the same night – 11:50 p.m.! Just after midnight, still trying to wake up,

we headed to the race start line (the lobby of the hotel) and immediately had James Curry and

team interviewing us for Birding Adventures TV (and cracking jokes!). It was quite a rude

awakening, really, ha ha! Leaving the cameras “in the dust”, about ten minutes later we found

ourselves at the birdwatching centre, where we heard a couple of shorebirds such as

Common Greenshank, making them the first birds for our list. The Next Generation Birders

then shared gen on a nearby Pallas’s (Great Black-headed) Gull, which we managed to see in

the dull lighting of the streetlamps. This is a wonderful race, in which all the teams freely

share information – and actually the Next Generation Birders

(http://nextgenerationbirders.blogspot.com/) won the prize for being the most helpful of all

the teams and sharing the most gen. A Champions of the Flyway whatssapp group was

created specifically for the purpose of sharing information between teams, in fact.

We then headed, in the dark, three hours to the north (Nizanna), stopping only at our

Western Barn Owl and Long-eared Owl stakeouts (both at Kibbutzim). Our two owls were

good news (as was Eurasian Stone-curlew), but we also got some bad news: just when it

was too late, we got a group whatssapp message that a Eurasian Scops Owl had been heard at

the Ben-Gurion Memorial – David Ben-Gurion was the founder and first prime minister of

Israel – and this was going to be a recurring theme: pass a site, get a whatssapp that we had

just missed something, get upset, and be forced to continue to find our next bird (because of

very limited time!). We were unable to return for the scops owl because we had bustards,

coursers, and sandgrouse to locate – we did quite well with those, thankfully, and also found

stacks of other goodies. One of the real highlights was hearing the A-M-A-Z-I-N-G insect-

like trill of a Savi’s Warbler.

Golden jackal distracted us and slowed us down a bit as we could not resist getting some

photos. (Jason Boyce)

But we then got one incredibly big fright when the Palestinian Sunbirders sent a message to

the whatssapp group just after dawn that they had over 100 species already (….while we were

just managing double digits). Ha ha, actually we caught up pretty nicely later in the day,

though, but this was an unpleasant surprise nonetheless.

Heading southwards, we managed to get ourselves an hour behind schedule. So we had to

forfeit the Bonelli’s Eagle lookout. We did do various other sites around Sde Boker, though,

which were very productive. Griffon Vulture, Egyptian Vulture, Northern Raven, Alpine

Swift, Common Swift (Pallid Swift eluded us today, even though it’s a fairly common bird

throughout the race area), Song Thrush, Common Blackbird, and numerous others put in an

appearance. Spotted Sandgrouse was a real highlight at the site that Meidad Goren very

kindly had shown us a couple of days back (although at that point the stakeout had lacked any

sandgrouse).

Birding the Kibbutzim (the same ones we previously did in the dark just for owls) was very

productive, generating Meadow Pipit, Cretzchmar’s Bunting, and many other new birds for

this big day.

Racing further southwards, when we eventually reached the HaMeshar Plains, where we were

hastily escorted back to the main road by the military, who told us that access to this area was

currently not possible. Since we were behind schedule we were unable to substitute this

habitat with the Uvda Valley further south, and thus missed a good number of species, such

as Asian Desert Warbler and Temminck’s Lark, which lurk only in this arid plains habitat.

We did find that a major feature of this race was that there were simply too many species to

target in 24 hours, so it was either a matter of doing fewer sites thoroughly, or a greater

number of sites very, very fast and only birding them “on the surface”. We opted for the latter

option, and by the end of the day we pretty much agreed that this was the best strategy, which

will only need some tweaks we’d want to make for 2016 to try again to perhaps take the title

of Champions of the Flyway! But well, we knew we were missing a couple of birds at each

stop we made. A 48-hour race is something the organizers have in fact talked about, which

would allow a more thorough treatment of the race area (although a 24-hour race must be

much less tiring and would have my vote - despite not allowing anything but a peripheral

treatment of the race area). Missing common and easy birds on the race day – such as Green

Bee-eater (and in fact both other bee-eaters) drives the point home that we had to bird

peripherally and not do any one site thoroughly at all.

Yotvata generated most of the target birds we had found during the scouting days, but since

we were still badly behind schedule we had to rush this site too. Since we were “ahead” of

most of the other teams (not necessarily in our bird count, ha ha, but in our travels

southwards back towards Eilat – most teams started in the north and headed gradually

southwards), we continued getting frustrating whatssapp messages such as “a Black Scrub

Robin showing extremely well at Yotvata – beautiful bird!”. There was never time to turn

back for anything, and neither was there time to stop for Arabian Warbler in the Acacia

stakeout we had previously familiarized ourselves with!

Continuing, Km 19 and 20 generated stacks of new birds for the day, including wildfowl,

gulls, terns, and shorebirds - including some single birds we managed to pick out (very

luckily!). These singletons included Red-necked Phalarope, Dunlin, Curlew Sandpiper,

and Pied Avocet (along with more abundant waders such as Common Redshank, Ruff – a

few of them starting to moult into breeding plumage, Kentish Plover, and stacks of others).

And pretty much we then headed back to Eilat, where we birded the productive wadi at

Holland Park, as planned finding new birds for the day such as Sand Partridge (although

that almost evaded us!). North Beach was next on our agenda, for the interesting-looking Red

Sea endemic White-eyed Gull (which is Near-threatened), along with various other gulls,

terns, and more.

After some desperate attempts for our bogey bird Green Bee-eater and a couple of other “silly

misses” we had to race back northwards to get to Km 19 for the dusk appearance of

Lichtenstein’s Sandgrouse and were amazed to add eight birds to our list here, the highlight

being Barbary Falcon. The sandgrouse came in on cue, while we spent quality time hanging

out with a bunch of newly-made friends – almost all the other teams waited with us for the

sandgrouse to wing their ways in.

Our final stop of the day was back in Eilat for Striated Heron, which unfortunately did not

show itself, meaning we ended on a round total of 150 bird species. We are quite proud of

this total, as it was our first attempt (we did not participate in the race in 2014). Among the

international teams, the winning score of 169 bird species went to the American team, and

we’d like to sincerely and hugely congratulate these star birders! Well done, Michael, Doug,

Glen, and Jeff! Truly a great bunch of folks, who we enjoyed chatting to whenever we

bumped into them during our time in Israel – see http://www.champions-of-the-

flyway.com/american-dippers/ for more details about this great team!

We saw Green Bee-eater virtually daily – except on the race day! (Jason Boyce)

What is a possible strategy for next year, based on what we learned this year? We think that

next year we could get 170 species and perhaps even win (ha ha, if extremely lucky!). Apart

from studying the stakeouts and species (especially the contact calls of overflying birds)

better, we’d also tweak some of the plan for the race day. It’s probably not the best idea to be

“ahead” of all the other teams in terms of position on the “race course”, as it means we dip on

more of the reported species (on the whatssapp group). On one hand, it often does feel good

to be “at the front” and to report the first owls, Savi’s Warbler, and more. But on the other

hand, it does not feel good to be too late to “twitch” the Eurasian Scops Owl or Black Scrub

Robin reported by teams “behind” us and speeding slightly less than us! In 2016, the biggest

tweak would probably be adding Yeroham Lake to our route, as that seemed to add a big

bunch of species to other teams’ lists (even if it means losing one or two other species

because we would have to do all the sites we did choose to do even faster). Frustratingly, the

copy of “A Guide to the Birding Hotspots of Southern Israel” by Shirihai et al. was waiting

for us on arrival back home (thank you, postal service…..NOOOT!!). This book might

certainly have helped a little, and we’ll certainly be reading it before next year’s event!

Every minute of this epic bird race was amazingly exciting, and one thing we did get very

right was that we had FUN – stacks and stacks of it!

And it must be emphasized that conservation fund-raising was what this exciting event was

all about – the real winner was the birds, as about US$50,000 was raised by all the teams, to

be donated directly to bird conservation in Cyprus. The biggest “THANK YOU” is due to all

the sponsors, of all the teams!

The group photo on North Beach just before the prize-giving ceremony – tired but happy

birders these are!

26 March

After sleeping in a little we attended the excellent prize-giving and closing ceremony, once

again giving us the opportunity to enjoy chatting to a great many new friends – the bonding

that happened between all the teams was quite something to experience; any so-called

“rivalry” was certainly friendly and pure fun! Thanks very much to all the local birders who

so freely shared their knowledge with us, all the other international teams who did the same,

and the organizers for making this an unforgettably spectacular event!

After lunch, we attended our first real Israeli bird twitch and finally got to see and photograph

Black Scrub Robin (if not on the race day) at Yotvata before heading back to Tel Aviv for

our early morning flight the next day. Tantalizingly, we also heard about a twitchable Grey

Hypocolius, but sadly would only have arrived at its site after dark by the time we heard

about this bird – one more potential lifer to return to Israel for in 2016 (although it’s a

vagrant, oops).

We finally caught up with the Black Scrub Robin!

The Grey Hypocolius that Oz Horine photographed – the same one we sadly did not have

time to chase!

Oz Horine and his team – this Israeli team came third overall, with 170 species (slightly

ahead of the top international team). Oz shared lots of good gen with us before the race day.

Cheers and good birding – and we’ll be adding Israel bird tours under the Asian bird tour

section on our website - http://birdingecotours.com/tours/tours-by-destination/asia . Also, we

have for several years now offered an “Owls of the World” birding tour to Israel – see

http://birdingecotours.com/tours/destination/country/israel .

See you in March 2016!

Spanish Sparrow was often-seen, but Dead Sea Sparrow did not “play ball” on the race day.

(Jason Boyce)