opisska
rabid twitcher
I found this is a good way to force myself to actually come through with the report, so I will once again start posting before going. We are headed to Oman on December 24 for a 12-day stay, which is mainly motivated by mammals, but since we are going there, we will also look at some birds - especially because the Czech Birding Contest now includes "greater WP" as one of the categories and I am not winning it yet, which is clearly outrageous.
I have downloaded some really nice report, which I have since lost, which had a list of birds, upon which I have based my "target list" by adding whatever else I could find in Birds of Middle East and confirm on Ebird that it actually gets seen at least once in a while. If someone is possibly looking for an inspiration, I have made it into a shareable google doc - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AefJYybXBrAvU1vCliYQe2xFxprs0pLctvs1cBHYQPk/edit?usp=sharing - the "new" sheet is the plan, the "old" is the rest of the list from the report (which I am sorry for not crediting as I can't find it) so that the whole list is somewhat useful for other people, because we already have a lot of local attractions from other places in the Middle East. For some birds there are recent Ebird sightings, for most other we plan to go by the "Birdwatching in Oman" book which a lovely colleague let us borrow for this trip. The "mammals" list also has a part about species we already have and then a very wild plan of what may be possible seen.
We plan to first try for the Omani Owl, which allows us to re-live the mystery of the Desert Owl in almost exactly the same manner. Once again, it's super secret on Ebird and Observation, and this time there are even zero recordings on XC, but funnily enough, HBW openly shows where to go to anyone interested (https://www.hbw.com/ibc/species/omani-owl-strix-butleri) so that's a pretty clear destination. The southernmost sighting is in the same place where several people saw Blanford's Fox - and even better, this area also has most of the bird species that we are looking for and can be only seen in the north.
That was something that really surprised me - that despite there being a huge amount of attractive sites in the north, there are really only very few (9 to be precise, but only 5 of the "expected" variety) target species that occur only in the north - it's simply too "Western Palearcty" there, whereas the south around Salalah is honestly much more Afrotropics than anything. Maybe eventually people will draw the line across Oman? Because really, all the weird things in the Arabian Peninsula occur on the south-western corner, because it's much wetter and closer to Africa than the rest. Due to the shape of the borders, the southern sites in Oman are really crammed and that's something to look forward - there seems to be so much, both regarding birds and mammals within a very small disatnce around Salalah, so this should be fun. For example Wadi Darbat, a small valley several kms long promises potentially three kinds of owls, a plenty of daytime bird specialties, a honeybadger, a gennet and several rodents ... I mean get me there asap!
The leader of the Czech "gWP" contest is 27 species ahead of me, which seems easy enough, but incidentally, more people from the club are coming at the same time - the best of them is 34 species behind me but he misses some of the easier species we already have, will dedicate all the time to birds and frankly he is bit more optimistic in determination, so he can rack species faster. So the game is on once again, thanks to the people who have redefined the WP for giving us something to do
edit: found the report, the one and only from which you can easily copy the list! https://www.surfbirds.com/trip_report.php?id=2741
I have downloaded some really nice report, which I have since lost, which had a list of birds, upon which I have based my "target list" by adding whatever else I could find in Birds of Middle East and confirm on Ebird that it actually gets seen at least once in a while. If someone is possibly looking for an inspiration, I have made it into a shareable google doc - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AefJYybXBrAvU1vCliYQe2xFxprs0pLctvs1cBHYQPk/edit?usp=sharing - the "new" sheet is the plan, the "old" is the rest of the list from the report (which I am sorry for not crediting as I can't find it) so that the whole list is somewhat useful for other people, because we already have a lot of local attractions from other places in the Middle East. For some birds there are recent Ebird sightings, for most other we plan to go by the "Birdwatching in Oman" book which a lovely colleague let us borrow for this trip. The "mammals" list also has a part about species we already have and then a very wild plan of what may be possible seen.
We plan to first try for the Omani Owl, which allows us to re-live the mystery of the Desert Owl in almost exactly the same manner. Once again, it's super secret on Ebird and Observation, and this time there are even zero recordings on XC, but funnily enough, HBW openly shows where to go to anyone interested (https://www.hbw.com/ibc/species/omani-owl-strix-butleri) so that's a pretty clear destination. The southernmost sighting is in the same place where several people saw Blanford's Fox - and even better, this area also has most of the bird species that we are looking for and can be only seen in the north.
That was something that really surprised me - that despite there being a huge amount of attractive sites in the north, there are really only very few (9 to be precise, but only 5 of the "expected" variety) target species that occur only in the north - it's simply too "Western Palearcty" there, whereas the south around Salalah is honestly much more Afrotropics than anything. Maybe eventually people will draw the line across Oman? Because really, all the weird things in the Arabian Peninsula occur on the south-western corner, because it's much wetter and closer to Africa than the rest. Due to the shape of the borders, the southern sites in Oman are really crammed and that's something to look forward - there seems to be so much, both regarding birds and mammals within a very small disatnce around Salalah, so this should be fun. For example Wadi Darbat, a small valley several kms long promises potentially three kinds of owls, a plenty of daytime bird specialties, a honeybadger, a gennet and several rodents ... I mean get me there asap!
The leader of the Czech "gWP" contest is 27 species ahead of me, which seems easy enough, but incidentally, more people from the club are coming at the same time - the best of them is 34 species behind me but he misses some of the easier species we already have, will dedicate all the time to birds and frankly he is bit more optimistic in determination, so he can rack species faster. So the game is on once again, thanks to the people who have redefined the WP for giving us something to do
edit: found the report, the one and only from which you can easily copy the list! https://www.surfbirds.com/trip_report.php?id=2741
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