Brief post from Eilat

I have been in Eilat for a little over a week now. It really is amazing here during the spring bird migration, and it isn't even in the peak yet. The last two days have been very nice - lots of interesting species flying through. Today, there were hundreds of raptors in the sky. It was really surreal - solitary raptors gliding in from the sea, but one after another all day. Looking through binoculars, everywhere I looked, I saw a raptor cruising in like some sort of invasion force. Amazing.

I've been learning a lot about the culture of bird banding. I'm staying with Michal and a couple of volunteers at the center. One is a serious Birdwatcher (note the capital letter). Apparently Birdwatching is serious business, with a great deal of prestige for people who are the first to record a species in an area, etc. There are a lot of those types here, and they really know their birds. I'm lucky if I can tell a duck from an eagle from a sparrow. At least now I can recognize a blackcap (the species we're working with).

The research is going well, but we could use another week. We won't get it, but we'll have a solid preliminary dataset. Next up will be the lizard work again with Uromastyx. We've also stumbled across a small project here with snakes. Apparently our enclosure with 50 blackcaps is irresistable to the local predators, and we have been finding carpet vipers (Echis coloratus) in our cage about every other day. We're talking about doing a foraging experiment on them. They are really pretty snakes, but quite poisonous. At least they seem to prefer blackcaps to human ankles.