jogresh
Bimble and patch
according to birds of the middle east, "Desert Whitethroat, Sylvia minula" is a regular winter visitor to southern Arabia, and Andrew Whitehouse in his recent trip report saw good numbers in Oman.
http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=274930
however according to Olsson et al there's no evidence the breeding range of this taxon extends further west than xinjiang.
so does anyone know which of the 6 clades the arabian visitors belong to??
i guess it's possible they are minula from western china but it strikes me as a strange direction to migrate in, but what do i know?!
cheers,
James
I've been wondering exactly the same thing, having spent 2 weeks there this January. I assumed that most of the wintering birds we had were halimodendri, as that seems to have a large breeding range well to the west of minula, the plumage seemed to more or less fit, and in particular they had a really striking call, completely unlike curruca. Initally, i had no idea what was giving these calls, and was really surprised to find that they were Lesser Whitethroats. The call matches halimodendri on Xeno-Canto, although i don't know what minula sound like. They were very vocal, i would guess to do with feeding interactions/territories. I did have one bird in the Al Hajar Mts which i felt was particularly small, sandy and spiky-billed.
I asked my friends about minula, but none of us knew anything about the taxon other than some of the recent blog posts on a couple of websites.
A quick look at wikipedia - with the usual caveats of course - suggests that minula (excluding halimodendri) winters Arabian Peninsula, southern Pakistan and NW India, this seems to be taken from HBW, which i don't have.
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