10,000 Birds

Kuwait is a relatively small State (17,818 square kilometers (6,880 square miles), including the Kuwaiti share of the Neutral Zone (2,590 sq km)) at the top of the Arabian Gulf, and is almost entirely flat desert. Kuwait was attacked and overrun by Iraq on 2 August 1990. Following several weeks of aerial bombardment, a UN coalition began a ground assault on 23 February 1991 that liberated Kuwait in four days. Kuwait spent more than $5 billion to repair oil infrastructure damaged during 1990-91. Burnt-out Iraqi vehicles still litter the desert in places. Summers here are long, hot, and mostly dry, with daily temperatures between 43º and 47ºC (110º and 120ºF) and high humidity in August. The fall and spring are pleasant and mild; winters are short and relatively cool. There are sandstorms in June and July; some rain, mainly in winter and spring. There are currently about 355 species on the Kuwait Bird List (George Gregory, Feb 2005), many of which are of course migrants and only seen on spring or autumn passage. Whilst there are no endemics, ongoing research on Bubiyan Island is apparently going to add many new species to the Kuwait breeding list.

Back in Kuwait again - the third time in three years, and also the second time in a month - primarily because our Saudi flights are now all slipping in Kuwait rather than Jeddah or Riyadh: yes, that’s how dangerous “the Kingdom” is getting for us Brits. (Anyway, I’m not exactly displeased: the Saudis seem to have problems at the moment with men wandering around in dull green shirts with cameras and long-lenses that the Kuwaitis don’t…it makes the birding here that much easier…)

And what a difference a few weeks makes (and what a difference a few more would make too!): where George had last month pointed out sites where migrants would be, this time we were pointing out the migrants themselves - birds like Garganey, Little and Spotted Crakes, and raptors like Short-toed Eagle - at least when it wasn’t raining, which it did rather a lot for a desert state…no wonder us English are so fixated on talking about the bad weather - the damn stuff follows us around…

We covered many of the sites that we’d gone to last month (with the exception of the desert areas) and saw about sixty species. Many of them were migrants, but we also saw the Western Palearctic’s only breeding Bank Mynas and a pioneer member of what may well become Kuwait’s next introduced breeding species - a very yellow Budgerigar picking seeds off the weeds in one of the Jahra Farm plots.

Budgerigar

Our conversations were also very interesting. George has been looking hard at Kuwait’s avifauna for a number of years, and his work stimulated some good debate (at least to my jet-lagged mind): the chat was much more about the taxonomic problems inherent within the birds we were seeing than how great it was to see the year’s first Hoopoes and with the arrival of some early warblers, wagtails and pipits, hirundines (don’t even mention the gulls we saw) etc the questions about which taxa they belonged to became quite intense. Virtually every single species we saw raised questions about affiliations, relationships, splits and lumps, “expert” opinion and observation…

Not sure where this is going? Well, consider the following species/forms:

• Grey Wagtail - meant to be monotypic, but far yellower than UK or East Asian birds, with a thinner, softer call
• White Wagtail - all alba or some persicus? And what is/was dukhinensis, a form that has been absorbed into alba?




Female Grey Wagtails




White Wagtails Motacilla alba alba

• Lesser Whitethroat - the bird we saw was brown-backed: most probably blythi? And is that Desert Lesser, or some other soon-to-be named species?
• Chiffchaff - this time round perhaps abietinus, though perhaps mainly tristis last month…
• Reed Warbler - the bird we saw was pale-throated with a noticeably contrasting mantle and rump: apparently a little early for fuscus but George was happy that it was this form. A good species - Caspian Reed Warbler?
• Stonechat - the birds we saw this time round were variegata. Is variegata a species: it certainly looks as different from maura as maura does from hibernans. Are all the Kuwaiti birds this taxon or are maura - supposedly widespread further south in the Gulf - occurring?


Male variegata Common Stonechat

• Bluethroat - apparently three variants with different throat colours pass through Kuwait…
• Isabelline Shrike - most local Gulf birders apparently don’t even look anymore they’re so variable.
• House Sparrow - much paler than UK/US birds: biblicus or indicus, or just sun-bleached feathering? Does anyone else care: this is after all a species that’s been transported around the world so many times that genetically it must be more mixed up than the average outcast at the local dog’s home…
• Spanish Sparrow - more restricted black on the throat and less heavily marked flanks than European birds.
• OK, Gulls - Good grief, just what are those blinking Lesser Black-backed types? How reliable are the ID criteria for cachinanns, because the variability in the birds here include differently coloured (yellow or pink) legs, dark or light eyes, different primary patterns…

We batted these questions back and forth, and I’m glad to say we didn’t claim to have all the answers.

“Glad to say” you say? Well, yes, because - and this is one of my pet birding peeves - there are far too many birders making ill-informed taxonomic statements at the moment in my opinion. I trust far more someone who says that they can’t always be sure, than someone who assumes they know everything. How can we make definitive statements when we know so little about some of these birds? What’s the baseline we can use when there have been so few studies that accurately track migratory birds from their breeding grounds to their wintering quarters and back again? Sample sizes are minute for so many of the studies that have been done. Many studies are made by birders who drop into a region once or twice and make statements based on too few observations. And many so-called experts try to make the rest of us feel like idiots because we ask them to explain themselves and all we get in response is one of those looks that say “What, you don’t understand what I’m saying?” - well, no, frankly, because what you’re saying doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

So - yes, I’m glad to say we didn’t come up with too many answers - but it was fun and thought-provoking, and neither of us felt like idiots…which is good…and we saw a lot of birds - whatever they were…

So thanks again, George, and see you again for some more intelligent discussion sometime! (Oh and thanks for stopping for the Dwarf Irises - cracking little plants…)