River of Birds in the Sky, Part 2

Bird migration is starting all around the world. This year I'm migrating myself—over to the Middle East to take part in Champions of the Flyway in Eilat, Israel. Teams of birders are competing to raise money to help BirdLife International stop the illegal killing of migrant birds along the Mediterranean/Black Sea flyway.

This year the funds we raise will be going to the Hellenic Ornithological Society, the BirdLife partner in Greece.

Hellenic Ornithological Society team members.

The 2016 Champions teams have already raised more than the original goal of $50,000, but now we're trying to see how much we can raise.

The Way-Off Coursers official logo.

You can learn all about this event, the teams, the causes, and so on, on the Champions website.

At this moment, I am sitting in the Turkish Airlines area of JFK airport, preparing to fly to Israel by way of Istanbul, for the start of the week of activities for Champions of the Flyway. From here on out, most of my communications on the event will likely be via social media. You can follow the hashtag #COTF2016 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can see updates on my social media channels and on those of Bird Watcher's Digest.

Let me leave you with the lyrics I wrote for this year's Champions event, "River of Birds in the Sky." You can hear the recording of the song and watch the video we made, on the Champions site, and on the BWD YouTube channel.




Thanks to those of you who supported our team (or another Champions team) this year. it's not too late to become a Champions yourself by contributing directly, or by buying an official shirt from our Champions team, the Way-Off Coursers, sponsored by Bird Watcher's Digest and Carl Zeiss Sports Optics.

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River of Birds in the Sky

(for Champions of the Flyway)

Verse 1.

For 10,000 years and more it’s been flowing this river of birds in the sky

Generations of people have watched it in awe and it still brings a tear to my eye

V 2.

Flying south in the fall and back north in the spring these millions must move to survive

Perils and dangers upon every side it’s a wonder any make it alive

Bridge

There are some with traps and guns who wait along the way

Birds are passing   the guns are blasting                     it’s such a crying shame

V 3.

Drawn by the seasons’ irresistible call           migrating from East and West

Some fly by day and others at night,              but all run this gauntlet of death

Bridge

Birds flying free know no borders, you see.   No one can claim them alone

This great migration over dozens of nations   Let’s help them safely get home

Chorus

Flying so free, soaring high                 A river of birds in the sky

We can help them you and I               the river of birds in the sky

V 6.

These senseless traditions, like many before, must soon go the way of all things

We’re the Champions of the Flyway my friend and our hope it is carried on wings

Bridge

A silent spring—what an awful thing—but what can one person do?

You can become a Champion, we’re all counting on you

Chorus

Flying so free, soaring high                 A river of birds in the sky

We can help them you and I               the river of birds in the sky

Flying so free, soaring high                 Millions of birds in the sky

Still brings a tear to my eye                A river of birds in the sky

—   Bill Thompson III, Whipple, Ohio, November 2015

Racing to Save Birds!

Dear Birding Friends and Friends of Birds:

There are many, many worthy conservation causes vying for your attention these days. Birdathons, appeals to save habitat, funding for field work on endangered species, even bird club scholarships to send young birders to nature camp. All of these are wonderful causes, worthy of your financial support.

To this chorus of causes I am adding another—and asking for your support. My friends at BirdLife International and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel are hosting a new event on April 1, 2014 with the goal of raising money to help stop the shooting and trapping of birds in southern and eastern Europe. 

The event is called Champions of the Flyway and while stopping the slaughter of migrant birds is its focus in 2014, the long-term goal is to support bird and habitat conservation efforts all along the major flyway that connects Eurasia with Africa—funneling millions of birds right through Israel.

Bird Watcher's Digest with financial support from some conservation-minded folks, is fielding a team for the Champions of the Flyway event! We're called The Way-off Coursers and our team members are George Armistead, Michael O'Brien, Ben Lizdas, and yours truly. We're not only planning to have fun whilst birding in the Eilat region of southern Israel on April 1, we're hoping to raise $5,000 to contribute to the Champions cause.

The event is a bird race (similar to a birdathon). All the teams will be birding within a limited geographic area, around Eilat in southern Israel, all day on April 1. Various awards will be given to the winning teams the following day, but the real winners will be the birds that we help to save through this very special conservation initiative. And the people all along the flyway who will get to see, hear, and delight in these birds in future years.

Why is Bird Watcher's Digest involved in a bird race on the other side of the world? Because bird conservation is a global challenge. And birding is a universal language, right? There are teams from England, the Netherlands, Finland, the USA, the country of Georgia, and a joint Israeli/Palestinian team! Truly international!

Palestine sunbird

Another reason I am committed to this project is thanks to the efforts of my dear friend Jonathan Meyrav, who is one of the event's creators and leaders. I met Jonathan in the Hula Valley of Israel a few years ago. We later spent time together when he came to visit my farm in Ohio. Jonathan is a world-class birder and a dedicated conservationist. When he asked me to put together a team for the Champions of the Flyway event when it was just an idea, I was determined to do so because his enthusiasm and dedication are contagious. And our friendship is something I cherish.

BT3 (left) and Jonathan birding in Ohio.

Won't you consider a contribution? Even a small donation counts toward our goal. As I write this, we're already at 32% of our fundraising goal! Wow!

Little green bee-eater.

You can follow the progress of The Way-off Coursers on the COTF website, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. The event's Twitter feed is @flywayschampions. Our team hashtag is #cotfwayoff and we'll also be posting when we can on our personal social media accounts.

Thanks so much for your support! On behalf of the Bird Watcher's Digest Way-off Coursers, we'll see you (way) out there with the birds!

—Bill
 
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This Birding Life Episode #37: Birding in Israel

Common crane.

Episode 37 of my podcast This Birding Life is now available for downloading or streaming over at Podcast Central. This episode is all about birding in Israel, with a focus on the birds and bird watching in the Hula Valley in the northeastern part of the country.

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.

My article about the trip will be in the forthcoming issue of Bird Watcher's Digest, out in the next few days.


I hope you'll give this new episode of This Birding Life a listen. Remember, each podcast episode comes in both audio-only (MP3) and enhanced audio with images (M4a) versions. And they are also available for free in the Podcasts section of the iTunes store.


I'd like to thank Zeiss Sports Optics for sponsoring TBL and Podcast Central.



Until next time, happy listening!

My Bird of the Year, Part 2

Picking up where I left off in my last post (from just before Christmas!) I've been scrolling through the images I downloaded onto my computer during 2011, trying to select my bird of the year. It's tough because all of the birds I'm choosing as finalists are ones that were particularly memorable for one reason or another. Like the male ruddy duck (above) that put on a show of extreme courtship, doing the bubble dance/display on a North Dakota slough last June. But for whom was he performing? There were no other ducks on that small patch of water. Yet he kept at it and I shot his picture over and over. Perhaps he was posing.

This adult male ruby-throated hummingbird let me get very close to him as he rested on a plant hanger in our garden. It was my best hummingbird photo of the year, taken on a fine July morning in southeastern Ohio.

On a pre-dawn birding outing at St. Marks NWR in the Florida panhandle in September I had to stop to snap this photo with my point-and-shoot Canon G12. The heron's silhouette on the dawn-brushed, still water was vastly more stunning than the camera's sensor and lens could capture. It was one of my more peaceful moments in the field in 2011, despite the mosquitoes and no-see-ums.
Back to North Dakota for an outing during the Potholes and Prairie Birding Festival on which we found a Sprague's pipit—a lifer for everyone in my group. Sadly there were no photos of the pipit, which was sky-dancing 300 feet above us.


And back to Oklahoma for another life bird for yours truly, a male black-capped vireo in the Wichita Mountains NWR. My friend Eric Beck knew just where to go to find vireo territories—a long hike up a canyon. And although we were on the early side of their spring return date, we did manage to find three different singing males. This was my best digiscoped shot of a male black-capped vireo—not great but a great adventure and memory!

In November I was on a birding tour in Israel and while there I got to enjoy hundreds of bird species that I've rarely, if ever, seen. I could make an entire BOTY list just from birds on that fantastic trip. But in the interest of staying focused, I'm going to narrow it down to just a few highlight birds, one of which is the male Palestine sunbird (above) which came to drink nectar on a flowering shrub just outside my hotel room in the Hula Valley. This is as close to a hummingbird as it gets in the Middle East. Lovely, active little birds.

The most stunning avian attraction of the Hula Valley where I spent most of my time in Israel was the giant flocks of common cranes that migrate through Israel in winter and spring. Some stay in the Hula for the winter and the local farmers and communities, along with local preserve/refuge managers are devising ways to keep the cranes from damaging crops while letting them spend the winter foraging and roosting. It's an ingenious concept—humans and birds coexisting symbiotically. On two separate mornings and several evenings we witnessed between 15,000 and 20,000 common cranes in giant, noisy, swirling flocks.

Here's a photograph of a tiny bird I found in the Agamon Valley in Israel. Believe it or not this is a warbler known as a chiffchaff. It's named for its onomatopoeic call chiff-chaff. This little guy (or gal) was foraging in some low weeds outside a viewing blind at the Hula-Agamon Park. After watching large mega-birds like cranes and eagles all day, it was a nice change to spend some time with a small songbird.

My closest-ever look at a merlin occurred in the Negev Desert near a birding hotspot that's basically a power highline cutting through agricultural fields. A small copse of pines were the only cover for miles around and our guide, Israeli birder Jonathan Meyrav had just said "This can be a good place for merlins" when we spotted this beauty in a tree.

As I flipped through the Middle East bird field guide on the flight over to Israel, this bird (above) was tops on my list of most wanted: the cream-coloured courser. We found a flock in the Negev Desert, just as a huge approaching storm made the afternoon seem like dusk. These coursers were digiscoped at a great distance, but were a thrilling sighting nonetheless.

Here we are at the end of a year of wonderful birds. These are only MY very subjective highlights and, as I said in the beginning of this post, it's really hard to choose just one to be my Bird of the Year. But I think I have one. It's the Bohemian waxwing, above. This was a life bird for me—one that had eluded me for many years. Bohenian waxwings are birds of the far North. However, the winter of 2010-11 was something of an invasion year for BOWAs and I did not want to miss out on my chance. So my friend Geoff Heeter (a native Michigander) and I made a road trip north, nearly to the Upper Peninsula, seeking a flock of these wandering fruiteaters. Every lead we chased came up empty, until a kind birder on the Mich-Birds listserv sent me a direct message with a hot tip for a place in Traverse City, where she'd seen Bohemians the day before. We got there, found a flock of seven, and I had my lifer (and so did Geoff).

This quest took on added significance because it came shortly after the rather sudden death of my dad, William H. Thompson, Jr. Shortly after Dad's memorial service, Geoff and I left Marietta, Ohio, headed north, and even if we hadn't seen a single Bohemian waxwing, the healing power of birding helped me to overcome my grief.

It's funny. Bird watching means different things to each of us. In 2011, as exciting as my birding experiences were, the one bird that sticks out is a life bird that helped me escape the agonizing pain caused by a death. Without birds, I'm not sure where I'd be right now. I'm so thankful for the wonder of birds, and for the joy that comes from watching them with my friends and family.

I'm looking forward the the birds of 2012!

Kingdom of Kingfishers!

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.

Hula Haiku

Water source of life
brings us together looking
sky peppered with birds