I once mused in a blog about how remarkably generous birders can be with their time, and (yet again) I was fortunate enough to begin my day’s birding in the company of a top birder - Dave Sargeant, one of Oman’s most respected resident birders, site-guide author (”Birdwatching Guide to Oman”), and one of the world’s top listers (well over 6000 species and counting). Dave had responded to an RFI I’d mailed before the trip, and though working that day had got up early and detoured to the hotel on his way into Muscat. Over a cup of coffee he provided a ton of info guaranteed to get me to some top sites…my thanks to him…

As it turned out I wasn’t able to use half of what Dave told me because the car rental company at the hotel seemed a little unable to take in just what “Look, please, I’m in a hurry” meant to a birder desperate to get going before the sun deep-fried the Omani countryside and sent any right-thinking bird into the densest (and coolest) cover available. By the time the car came (the rental agent said it was “nearby” - going by how long it took to get here perhaps it had been pushed to the hotel instead of being driving?) my plans had undergone numerous changes and, when I was told that the car needed to be back by six-o-clock that evening or I’d incur some steep extra charges, they changed again.

In a dangerously irritable mood I decided that I may as well concentrate on some local areas rather than shooting off into the far distance, staying too long, and risking getting back late…all for the best probably: I’ve made some pretty poor decisions when I’m tired and racing back to a hotel in the middle of the night (I’ll tell you about a fiasco when I got mugged by a smirking traffic-cop in SE Brazil a few years ago if you remind me…)

Fortunately Dave had perhaps anticipated problems like late cars, and given me detailed directions and tips (”follow the yellow sewage trucks”, being one useful one) to get to two local sites: Sunub Waste Disposal Site, and the Al Ansab Sewage Lagoons.

Sunub Waste Disposal Site:

Tucked away in the back of some strikingly barren mountain habitat (photo above), the Sunub site is a raptor hot-spot, and only about 20km from the centre of Muscat. Trucks regularly dump everything from household waste to dead sheep in a number of places scattered throughout the site - much to the gratitude of the local Egyptian Vultures (residents are joined by large numbers of wintering and passage birds) and Brown-necked Ravens, and visiting raptors such as Steppe and Spotted Eagles.

The official advice is that a permit is required to visit the site, but the guard at the front-gate barely acknowledged me as I waved at him - and I drove all over the area with no problems (though it may be different on other occasions obviously). The entire site is actually quite small, and is dominated by a large, heavily-disturbed central area where bulldozers are hard at work raising dust and flattening whatever the queue of trucks dump in front of them. Needless to say, there are no birds here, and the best spot (at least for me, and on this day of course) was down a track that turned off to the right about 100m past the main gates.

I’d expected the near-endemic Hume’s Wheatear here (the steep slopes that the track goes through looked ideal) but unfortunately I was either unlucky or still too fuming to concentrate properly (the latter, I strongly suspect)…but I did get some good views of a group of rather skittish Egyptian Vultures and an immature Steppe Eagle standing on the corpse of a very bloated sheep. (I didn’t see the eagle feed, incidentally, and I may have been imagining it but I’d swear that the bird was standing there wondering just what sort of mess it’d get covered in if it burst the sheep with its bill…)

Egyptian Vultures, Sunub Waste Disposal Site, Muscat

 

Imm Steppe Eagle and Egyptian Vulture (top left), adult steppe Eagle (top right)
Egyptian Vulture and Brown-necked Raven (bottom left), immature and adult Egyptian Vultures (bottom right)

 

Imm Steppe Eagle, Sunub Waste Disposal Site, Muscat

After an hour or two - and as the raptors and ravens (image left) were spiralling away out of sight on the rising thermals - I decided it was time to move on. Just past the turn-off to the site is the small village of Sunub. It’s not mentioned in the guide as being anything special, but I hoped (again) for the wheatear and whatever migrants I might come across. Driving around the village with the windows down and scouring the area with keen eyes (well, to be honest, with red and squinting eyes - the desert and hills here seem to reflect the light like glass) and with the subtle fragrance of rotting waste and decaying sheep still in my nostrils I once again failed to find the wheatear but did make the first of the day’s interesting discoveries - a Common Koel, a bird rarely recorded in this part of Oman, giving its “gone bonkers” call (actually a rising and fevered “Ko-ell… koell… koel… koel koel-koel-koel” that always sounds to me like it’s not just mad dogs and Englishmen that’ve been out in the midday sun) from what looked like a small orchard.

Sadly I couldn’t actually get any views of it - but while looking I did come across a cracking Orphean Warbler picking its way through a tangle of thorn bushes, an Indian Roller, Indian Silverbill, and literally hundreds of butterflies: mostly (from what I could ID) Painted Ladies, but also some species of Blue and a beautiful Citrus Butterfly Papilio demoleus demoleus (image right)…the benefits to wildlife of NOT soaking the habitat with chemicals all too obvious as always…

Al Ansab Sewage Lagoons:

Al Ansab Lagoons, Muscat

Not far from Sunub is the second of Muscat’s “disposal sites” - the sewage lagoons at Al Ansab. Directions to the site are well-covered in the site guide, but Dave had advised me that morning that the road system around Al Ansab had changed a great deal recently (as elsewhere in the Gulf there is a huge amount of development going on) and had assured me that if I got lost I should follow the yellow sewage trucks that trundled back and forth. How right he was. But how do you tell which trucks are going TO the lagoons and which are going AWAY? The rule of thumb I eventually worked on is that if the trucks are going really fast then they’re FULL - if they’re going like the clappers with scant regard for anything else on the road, they’re probably empty…yeah, I made a few circles around the new roundabouts following empty trucks heading off to who-knows-where… but eventually I found my way there by following a particularly lumbering and weighty-looking truck through a busy industrial estate, down Al Azaiba Street, and then down Al Beea’ Street where the sewage plant is located…

The lagoons are formed from overspill from the sewage works next to them. An extensive area with well-developed reed-beds, Al Ansab’s species list is over 250 and includes many vagrants. From the air it must be a remarkably attractive place to an overflying migrant, but unfortunately today it appeared that migrants were either not migrating or just plain overflying…sadly it was all rather quiet, but it’s virtually impossible to go to the Middle East in late March and not see something…

Pulling up onto a bund and driving in an anti-clockwise direction, I soon saw a bare tree at the edge of one of the lagoons festooned with sinensis Great Cormorants and two Sacred Ibis - the latter a rare vagrant with just three accepted previous records! Looking through the bird list Dave had kindly provided me with, I found a note of caution though: there were seven other individuals recorded, all of which were listed as escapes - the last one at Al Ansab…

Sacred Ibises, Al Ansab Lagoons, Muscat

It’s an odd feeling finding a potential vagrant that may in fact be nothing more than a long-staying escapee. I’d not met Dave before and even though his parting words had been to give him a ring if I found anything worth reporting you just never know what you may be disturbing - that vital moment as the contract-of-a-lifetime is just being signed, the exact time that a rollocking from a boss fed-up with all the time taken off to go birding is being delivered…who knows. But then again, waiting until you get back to the UK to tell the official Recorder of the country’s Bird Records Committee that you’d seen a fourth and fifth at a site he’d just sent you to is really not on either…

Of course - I phoned.

Fortunately neither of the two unlikely scenarios I’d fretted about appeared to be happening (if they were, Dave Sargeant is one remarkably well-controlled individual) and I was assured that the call was welcomed, and that the ibises certainly weren’t long-staying escapes, though without some research it was not going to be possible to say whether or not they were genuine vagrants (in fact, the Koel seemed to interest Dave more)…such is life, but the moral here is - if you’re on someone else’s patch, please do them the courtesy of letting them know what’s around. Especially in areas where there are few birders it’s easy for visitors to provide important data to conservationists - and you just never know when that data could be used (okay, I’m thinking here of visitors to South Korea who don’t tell anyone what they’ve seen, but the principle is the same wherever you go…)

Anyway, after the initial excitement the Lagoons were a little disappointing. I saw just one alba wagtail, one Citrine Wagtail, no pipits, and just three hirundines - odd considering that I’d seen masses of wagtails and both Barn Swallows and Sand Martins in reasonable numbers further north in Kuwait three weeks earlier .

Migrant shorebirds were in very low numbers too, but I did get reasonable views of a Clamorous Reed Warbler that responded to some pishing - the short primary projection can’t be seen in the photos below, but it is worth noting the quite long supercilium which I have to confess threw me slightly at first.

Clamorous Reed Warbler, Al Ansab Lagoons, Muscat

Another good sighting was a Spotted Crake that I glimpsed disappear hurriedly off a flooded track into a reed bed. I’ve always wanted to photograph a Spotted Crake, and unable to resist the challenge - and frankly too tired to want to have to drive off to another site so late on - I decided to wait for it to come back out again. It only took an hour: one bleeding hour up to my ankles in sewage, being buzzed by flies, and parboiled by the sun…but at least the next time I see one running lightly over a sewage bed into thick cover I’ll be able to smile to myself and walk the other way…

Spotted Crake, Al Ansab Lagoons, Muscat

I had planned to wait until nearly dusk to try to see a party of Lichtenstein’s Sandgrouse that regularly fly into the Lagoons, but with time running out on the car-rental and at least a 30 minute journey back to the hotel I decided to call it a day.

I didn’t see Hume’s Wheatear and there were surprisingly few migrants around (the full list for the day is at the bottom of the page) - but for a day’s birding it wasn’t too bad at all: and let’s be honest, a sunny March day in Muscat beats a rainy March day in the UK hands-down…

Squacco Heron

Red-wattled Plover

Graceful Prinia

Purple Heron (left) and Moorhen with chicks (right)

All photographs © Charlie Moores

Trip List (note, numbers are in most cases approximate):
English and scientific names mainly from “Oman Bird List”, Eriksen J, D. Sargeant, and R. Victor, CESAR, 2003:

Little Egret Egretta garzetta, c) 10; Great Egret Egretta alba 1; Grey Heron Ardea cinerea 5; Purple Heron Ardea purpurea 2; Black-crowned Night-heron Nycticorax nycticorax 1; Squacco Heron Ardeola ralloides 1; Sacred Ibis Threskiornis aethiopicus 2; Common Teal Anas crecca 2; Garganey Anas querquedula 1; Pintail Anas acuta 6+ ; Egyptian Vulture Neophron percnopterus c) 20; Marsh Harrier Circus aeruginosus 2; Spotted Eagle Aquila clanga 1; Steppe Eagle Aquila nipalensis 2; Osprey Pandion haliaetus 1; Grey Francolin Francolinus pondicerianus 1; Spotted Crake Porzana porzana 1; Moorhen Gallinula chloropus 3-4; Black-winged Stilt Himantopus himantopus 2; Common Snipe Gallinago gallinago 6; Red-wattled Plover Hoplopterus indicus Green Sandpiper Tringa ochropus 1; Wood Sandpiper Tringa glareola 1; Common Sandpiper Actitis hypoleucos 1; Black-headed Gull Larus ridibundus 10; Rock Dove Columba livia c)10; Laughing Dove Streptopelia senegalensis +; Common Koel Eudynamys scolopacea 1 heard; Little Green Bee-eater Merops orientalis 4; Indian Roller Coracias benghalensis 1; Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica 3; Citrine Wagtail Motacilla citreola 2; White Wagtail Motacilla alba 1; Red-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus cafer 1; Yellow-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus xanthopygos c) 10; Graceful Warbler/Prinia Prinia gracilis 10+; Clamorous Reed Warbler Acrocephalus stentoreus 4-5; Orphean Warbler Sylvia hortensis 1; Purple Sunbird Nectarinia asiatica 10+; Brown-necked Raven Corvus ruficollis c)10; Common Mynah Acridotheres tristis c)10; House Sparrow Passer domesticus +; Indian Silverbill Euodice malabarica 1