Smyrna kingfisher in the pre-dawn fog at Hula-Agamon Park.
I was in Israel on a birding tour over the Thanksgiving holiday this year, attending the
Hula Valley Bird Festival. The trip was amazing and amazingly birdy almost everywhere we went. For this post I'm going to highlight the incredible density of kingfishers we encountered.
But first some background!
I'd been to Israel once before, in the late 1980s. I'd be shocked if any readers of this blog recall my article about that trip, written for
Bird Watcher's Digest and published in the September/October 1985 issue of BWD. That was my first-ever BWD article written about my first-ever official overseas birding trip! Both times I had to do some careful thinking and planning both because Israel is a long way away and because it's in a part of the world that's often in the news, usually due to political unrest between neighbors. Fortunately on both trips, each lasting more than a week, any concerns I had were unwarranted—the people were friendly, the neighbors were neighborly, the weather was wonderful, the landscape was beautiful and the birds were beyond expectation.
Consider yourself warned that I'm working on another Israel article, along with a podcast, and a gallery of images for the not-so-distant future for BWD. Now back to the kingfishers.
Located as it is in the middle of the arid, mostly desert Middle East, Israel would be no more bird-rich than its neighbors except for one major factor: water. Water flows through this country from north to south and it is channeled and used in a variety of ways, especially for agriculture. Wherever this water occurs, so do birds, especially water-loving birds like the kingfishers. We encountered three kingfisher species during our time in the Hula Valley in northern Israel and on short trips out from the valley in all directions: the common kingfisher, the pied kingfisher, and the white-throated or Smyrna kingfisher.
Pied kingfishers at a fish farm.
Israel has a lot of fish farms. These fish farms have a lot of fish, which means they also have a lot of fish-eating birds. Nearly every day during our birding trip we stopped at some set of man-made ponds, reservoirs, fish farms, or water-treatment facility. We'd scan the water and shoreline for birds, often looking past the number of kingfishers present. In the image above, there are eight pied kingfishers on a single perch. We sometimes would see twice that many or more perched on sticks and posts along one side of a pond. It was nuts! Only a few individuals were so intent on fishing that they allowed close approach. This is likely a result of the bird-scaring efforts that the fish farmers have to do in order to control the loss of their "crop" to the crops of birds.
The small common kingfisher, which is widespread in Europe, seemed to be the most shy. We'd normally catch brief glimpses of one as it zipped low over the water from one hidden perch to another. Or we'd spy their glimmering iridescent plumage at a distance as we were scanning with our optics.
White-throated kingfisher, aka Smyrna kingfisher, aka white-breasted kingfisher. The largest of the three kingfisher species we encountered is the white-throated kingfisher, also often referred to as the Smyrna kingfisher. These stunning and bold birds were noisy enough to make their presence known even when they were out of our direct sight.
The pied kingfisher is a study in blacks and whites as its name implies. Slightly smaller than the white-throated kingfisher, the pied was our most frequently seen kingfisher species. Both of the larger kingfishers could regularly be seen away from water, hunting lizards and geckos from a watching perch.
Water brings life to the desert and attracts living things from all directions. It is the kingdom of kings and the kingdom of kingfishers, too!
Here are a few of my better kingfisher images from last week's trip. Enjoy!
A pied kingfisher launching from a perch over water in the Hula Reserve Park.
Hovering pied kingfisher at Ma'agan Michael along the Mediterranean.
No one knows why this species is named white-throated kingfisher.
Common kingfisher held by a staff member at the Hula-Agamon ringing (banding) station.
Pied kingfisher at Ma'agan Michael.
I visited Israel in November of 2011 for a week of birding and I have to say it was an amazing experience with a super-abundance of birds.
We watched birds in a variety of habitats, including fish ponds on aquaculture farms, where the fish farmers set aside certain ponds for the birds to use. The Hula Valley is like a green, water-rich oasis sitting at the top of a natural migration corridor (the Rift Valley) surrounded by desert. Millions of birds pass through the Hula in spring and fall.
We got out in the field before dawn to watch the common cranes take off to spend the day foraging in the surrounding agricultural fields. And we returned at night to watch them again. The word "spectacle" doesn't quite do the scene justice.
We also birded in remote areas along Israel's borders, where the presence of minefields keeps vast tracts of habitat wild and inhabited only by birds and beasts.
Our hotel courtyard featured several pairs of Palestine sunbird, the nearest thing Middle Eastern bird watchers can get to a hummingbird.
