Christmas Eve!

Santa Claus!

We spent the morning at Green Island. While four of us went out on the island the gull maniac Hans spotted a Crested Tern among all the gulls.

Crested Tern

Larus rex

Birds we found on the island included six Red-vented Bulbuls, ten Grey Hypocoliuses, a White-breasted Kingfisher, two Daurian Shrikes and suprisingly a very late adult Barred Warbler.

Red-vented Bulbul

Fantastic four?

Daurian Shrike

Barred Warbler

Grey Hypocolius

After this we moved on to Kuwait Towers to search for the Bank Mynahs. There we were surprised to find an adult Barbary Falcon sitting on one of the towers! After some time we also spotted eight Bank Mynahs among the Common Mynahs.

Barbary Falcon

Bank Mynah

The hours around noon were spent at the high tide roost at Doha Spit where we could enjoy 160 Crab Plovers and a lot of other nice birds. Despite driving to different places along Sulaibikhat Bay we couldn’t find the Lesser Flamingo. Is it gone or in another part of Kuwait Bay?

Crab Plover

Lesser Sand Plover

Greater Sand Plover

Broad-billed Sandpiper

Terek Sandpiper

Four of us went to Jahra East in the afternoon and Hans stayed at Doha Spit and continued to drewl over all the gulls. We never reached Jahra East Outfall due to the recent rain. Two of us wanted to test the car’s capacity but the other two didn’t, so we stopped and birded the surroundings instead, but didn’t find much of interest. At the same time Hans had filmed and painted quite a lot of gulls.

Heuglin's Gulls:

Steppe Gulls:







Caspian Gulls:





Armenian Gulls:

The evening was spent in the hotel room with Christmas presents and lots of coffee. After chilling with 1½ hours of gull film we decided to visit Al-Abraq tomorrow. Over and out!