09 July 2006, Dubai, UAE

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a constitutional federation of seven emirates; Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Qaiwain, Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah. The federation was formally established on 2 December 1971. The UAE occupies an area of 83,000 sq km along the south-eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Qatar lies to the west, Saudi Arabia to the south and west, and Oman to the north and east. The capital of the federation, Abu Dhabi, is located in the emirate of the same name. Four-fifths of the UAE is desert, but towns and cities are kept very “green” with many parks, gardens, and plantations. Dubai itself is a cosmopolitan society with an international lifestyle, yet with a culture deeply rooted in the Islamic traditions of Arabia. Since earliest times, Dubai has been a meeting place, bringing together the Bedouin of the desert interior with the pearl-diver, the merchant of the city with the sea-going fisherman.

I spent an extremely hot (you think it’s been hot in the UK this summer - the temperature here reached 46c at one point!) but very good afternoon visiting several sites in Dubai with Emirates Bird Recorder Tommy Pedersen, an ex-pat Norwegian, airline pilot, excellent birder, and a really top bloke to boot.

We covered about 400km, birding the east coast (between the two sections of Oman), the hills, the desert, and the well-known rarity hot-spot of Fujairah Dairy Farm, and saw some really good birds - including my first Persian Shearwaters and a Lichenstein’s Sandgrouse (which amazed Tommy by coming into water at least two hours earlier than he would normally expect), and taxa I very rarely see like Sooty Gull (an absolutely beautiful gull, we saw several hundred), Bridled Tern (including sightings of two being klepto-parasitised by a dark-phase Pomarine Skua), the globally-threatened kalbaensis race of Collared Kingfisher (at Khawr Khalba), several Yellow-throated Sparrow, and a Hume’s Wheatear.

‘Bird of the day’ (at least for Tommy), was a species I actually do see fairly often - the UAE’s first ever mid-summer record of Rufous Turtle Dove, which amazingly was with a flock of over thirty Turtle Doves close to a well right out in the middle of the desert!

The trip began at about 13:00 - who says it’s just ‘mad dogs and Englishman’ who go out in the midday sun? - when Tommy picked me up from the hotel in a gleaming and (thankfully) air-conditioned 4×4 (yeah, I know, the carbon offset meter was really whirring round this afternoon…).

We headed away from the grid-locked city (not been to Dubai for a while? It’s grown - a lot…) and into the relative peace and quiet of the desert - a rocky, shimmering, boiling hot sort of a place where the sparrows sit under bushes panting and only the goats and the odd lunatic birder move more than a yard or so from the nearest shade. Winding down the car windows was like opening an oven door. How on earth anything survives out there I’ll never know, but at out first stop - the Al Awir Recharge Basin Area (apparently) - a veritable crowd of immature Red-wattled Lapwings and Black-winged Stilts wandered around in the haze.

Drowning in our own sweat just thirty minutes into the afternoon’s birding didn’t appeal to either of us, so we got back into the car, crossed into the mountains, and headed to the Fujairah National Dairy Farm at Dibba - an absolute hot-spot for migrants as it’s a green oasis in the midst of some very dusty land. Of course, to see rare migrants you do have to be there when rare birds are migrating - but there were quite a few birds around and we did see (briefly unfortunately) one of the local Bonelli’s Eagles, small numbers of Common Kestrels, and the odd Purple Sunbird.

Birds taking advantage of the dehydrated flies spiralling in weary circles over the bags of leather that pass for cows here (if life ever gets too tough, imagine being a dairy cow in Dubai in 40c heat) included - rather bizarrely - a juvenile Whiskered Tern which circled a small pond before wheeling away over the cow-sheds, a family of Green Bee-eaters, a couple of Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters flying overhead, and plenty of Indian Rollers. Best bird here was an unapproachable, wary, and undoubtedly puzzled European Roller (a species not normally found here in the summer) perched out on a defunct sprinkler system wondering why central Europe was so much hotter than usual and surrounded by immature and adult Red-wattled Lapwings.

Red-wattled Lapwing Vanellus indicus

Green Bee-eater Merops orientalis (Adult (centre) with two juveniles)

Indian Roller Coracias benghalensis

Much as I like the smell of cooking cow dung, we hustled quickly back to the icy interior of Tommy’s car and headed on to the next site - the first of a series of sea-watching stops which took in Ra’s Dibba, Fujairah Port Beach, and Al Ghurfa Breakwater.

I have to confess I find seawatching as dull as - well, watching an empty sea hoping something will fly by (wait - that IS ’seawatching’). That’s probably because I haven’t done much seawatching at places where half a dozen tern species can be seen (Bridled, Saunders’s, White-cheeked, Lesser Crested, Sandwich, and Common), where Persian Shearwaters (spilt by some authorities from Audubon’s Shearwater, which in turn is very closely related to Little Shearwater) skitter across the horizon, and where one of the world’s most striking gulls - Sooty Gull - is relatively common. Plus I got to try out a novel form of seawatching where you sit on the tail-gate of a 4×4 and use the cavernous interior as a relaxing, shady place to watch the world (and the seabirds) go by…beats sitting on a cliff in the rain any day I can tell you (which is how I remember most of my UK seawatching trips).

Sooty Gulls Larus hemprichii

With the sun just starting to dip, and the temperature dropping to an almost balmy 36c, we next went to the renowned Khwar Khalba - a lagoon with a remnant patch of mangroves that is home to the extremely localised and threatened kalbaensis form of Collared Kingfisher. Accessed over an old iron pontoon bridge, Khalba is nominally one of the few Nature Reserves in the region - though the three locals we encountered tearing up and down the lagoon on jet-skis threatened to undo any good work done here…Tommy (to his credit) was straight onto his mobile phone to alert the local police, but the derisory fine they would apparently levy if they caught the selfish b******ds would hardly discourage someone who can afford a jet-ski. Still, at least he tried…

Kwhar Kalba

Collared Kingfisher Todirhamphus chloris kalbaensis

Greater Sand Plover Charadrius leschenaultii

Slender-billed Gull Larus genei

Despite the horrendous disturbance we did manage to quickly locate one of the Kingfishers (in fact we found it because Tommy pulled up and said “look”, and I ‘looked’ in almost the opposite direction and put my binoculars straight onto one sat minding its own business in one of the nearby mangroves!), and had reasonable views of a small number of terns, gulls, and shorebirds (including our only Slender-billed Gulls, both Greater and Lesser Sandplovers, Kentish Plovers, a superb summer-plumaged - and presumably unrequited given how early it had left the breeding-grounds - Sanderling, and three Terek Sandpipers). If it hadn’t been for the idiots with their shiny toys we’d probably have seen quite a bit more, but I did get a few photos and got to shake my fist a bit…good enough in the circumstances I guess…

With time running out - all of this was taking place on a very truncated day remember - Tommy floored the accelerator drove very carefully and safely to one of the most evocative birding “sites” I’ve been to for a long time: the newly- tarmacced Huwaylat Road.

Laid alongside a hugely expensive and newly-erected border fence between Dubai and Oman (oh, the threat, the threat…), the ‘new’ Huwaylat Road replaces an almost unnavigable dirt track (photo above) that winds through some truly beautiful mountainous desert. The scenery here is stunning - if like me you like desolate vistas of thorn bushes and rocks - and you get the feeling that any bird out here could be something really special…

And depending on where you normally do your birding everything out here is ’special’ - from the numerous Desert Larks and Yellow-throated Sparrows to the chunky and rather gorgeous Hume’s Wheatear we found flicking along a line of bushes.

Despite some slight weariness from the heat and lack of sleep, I really perked up on this drive. The Huwaylat Road is just how desert birding in the Gulf should be - lonely, at first sight almost empty, and completely absorbing. And not a city light or roundabout anywhere…wonderful!

Perhaps the best single site along the road is a freshwater ‘well’ about 10metres wide (with a smaller less productive well next to it). Tommy had said that - had we had the time to wait another 90 minutes (which we didn’t) - the well was a dead cert for the beautiful Lichtenstein’s Sandgrouse, which would come to drink after dark (unlike the commoner Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse which comes in the morning). However - and, take note, all you blogreaders out there who think I make up half the birds I say I see - as we walked away from the car we heard a peculiar call and looked up to see a Lichtenstein’s arrowing towards the water like a missile.

As it dropped down behind a fold in the rocks - how can I put this politely? - Tommy expressed his great surprise at what he considered was my excessive good fortune…You betcha, I am indeed one very fortunate birder…

Unsurprisingly the sandgrouse didn’t stop around and as it shot away again we turned to look at a flock of doves that had fluttered up form the well and was now spread along the border fence and the bushes behind. Tommy had said that on a visit a few days before he’d seen about 20 European Turtle Doves - a species that is not supposed to breed in the UAE, but the remarkable 35 (34 more than I’d seen this year so far!) we counted seems to suggest that status needs revising. As we scanned through them both Tommy and I came across a darker and larger dove sat amongst the flock: we both turned to each other at the same time and said, “You see that dove on the left - top of the bush behind the fence?”. Indeed we both did - the UAE’s first ever summer record of Rufous Turtle Dove - an eastern species I actually see more often than the European birds (for a gallery taken in Japan go to Japan, Jan 06 . I managed to grab a few long-distance photos before we got a little too close and the entire flock lifted up and disappeared into Oman…(It’s perhaps worth mentioning that the dove was seen again a week later by a couple of Dubai’s resident birders, but that they were forced away from the site by the military who objected to them getting out of the car so close to the border fence…apparently we were even luckier than either of us realised at the time!)

Rufous Turtle Dove Streptopelia orientalis meena (with Collared Dove (left) and European Turtle Dove (rear))

With the sun now setting we headed back to Dubai. making one last stop on our way back to the city - a rocky outcrop where a Pharaoh Eagle Owl had been seen on a number of occasions. We didn’t see it - and in fact if it hadn’t been for the full moon we wouldn’t have actually been able to see our hands in front of our faces. However, it was a beguiling way to end a very successful and highly enjoyable six hours of birding - and my thanks to Tommy for all his efforts, his planning, and his very good humour throughout…

Day List
Persian Shearwater Puffinus (lherminieri) persicus 6; Socotra Cormorant Phalacrocorax nigrogularis 3; Western Reef Heron Egretta gularis 2; Bonelli’s Eagle Hieraaetus fasciatus 1; Common Kestrel Falco tinnunculus 8; Eurasian Oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus 1; Black-winged Stilt Himantopus himantopus 40+; Red-wattled Lapwing Vanellus indicus 40+; Kentish Plover Charadrius alexandrinus 20+; Lesser Sand Plover Charadrius mongolus 4; Greater Sand Plover Charadrius leschenaultii c)20; Green Sandpiper Tringa ochropus 1; Terek Sandpiper Xenus cinereus 2; Sanderling Calidris alba 1; Pomarine Skua Stercorarius pomarinus 2; Sooty Gull Larus hemprichii 200+; Slender-billed Gull Larus genei 2; Lesser Crested Tern Sterna bengalensis 3-4; Sandwich Tern Sterna sandvicensis 10+; Common Tern Sterna hirundo 10+; Saunders’ Tern Sterna saundersi 10+; White-cheeked Tern Sterna repressa c)10; Bridled Tern Sterna anaethetus 40+; Whiskered Tern Chlidonias hybridus 1; Lichtenstein’s Sandgrouse Pterocles lichtensteinii 1; European Turtle Dove Streptopelia turtur 35; Rufous Turtle Dove Streptopelia orientalis 1; Eurasian Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto +; Laughing Dove Streptopelia senegalensis +; Collared Kingfisher Todirhamphus chloris kalbaensis 1; Green Bee-eater Merops orientalis c)10; Blue-cheeked Bee-eater Merops persicus 4-5; European Roller Coracias garrulus 1; Indian Roller Coracias benghalensis 10+; Desert Lark Ammomanes deserti 2; Crested Lark Galerida cristata 3-4; White-spectacled Bulbul Pycnonotus xanthopygos 2; Graceful Prinia Prinia gracilis 1; Clamorous Reed Warbler Acrocephalus stentoreus 1; Hume’s Wheatear Oenanthe alboniger 1; House Sparrow Passer domesticus +; Yellow-throated Sparrow Petronia xanthocollis c)10; Indian Silverbill Lonchura malabarica 6-8;

If you’d like to know more about the birds of the UAE, check out Tommy Pedersen’s excellent and very informative Birding the UAE website.

Huwaylat road (Hatta to Kalba) at dusk

All photos copyright Charlie Moores