Wrap up Egypt

Our Egypt trip is now almost finished, yesterday we got our last two remaining target birds here in Egypt. The Senegal Coucal and Streaked Weaver. They were both relatively easy to locate in the agricultural fields close to Abou Hamad just north-east of Cairo. The Coucal we found almost directly

The Weaver was harder lo locate and we walked the foot paths among the fields for quite some time. Eventually three birds came flying over and landed shortly in some reeds so that we could all get good views. Pretty good birding in general in that area, with lots of Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters and also quite a few Greater Painted Snipe.

Apart from the debacle with binoculars at Egyptian customs, the Egypt trip must be considered a total success. We missed two species, the African Skimmer and the Goliath Heron, neither were present we believe.

Despite the chaotic traffic, we have managed to have zero incidents with the car, which by the way was a great car. Jeep Wrangler.

We were very happy with the 4WD jeep, so when we got stopped by the military at Suez and they asked if the car was 4WD, we said yes yes officer – it’s 4WD. That turned out to be the wrong answer there, no 4WD vehicles are allowed at all on the Sinai peninsula. Apparently this was part of a drive from the Egyptian authorities to fuck with the beduins – who they for some reason don’t like.

We have received a lot of help from various friends during out two week trip here in Egypt. Thanks a bunch !!!

• Tomas Axen Haraldsson has led several trips to Egypt over the year. Tomas provided valuable information during the entire trip. He also set us in contact with:
• Haitham Ibrahim, who also provided good info several times. Haitham set us in contact with:
• Atyat Ghareeb, she borrowed us Haithams old binoculars. We would have missed species without those.
• Mohamed Habib provided good info.
• Bob Swann, provided the call of the Yellow Bittern. Without that we would have missed the bird. The song that exists on Xeno Canto is all wrong. We later also got the same song by email from Santamaa Markku.
• Dan Pointon had good information on the Saunders Tern.
• Istvan Molodovan who does field work in Egypt had good information on which roads were possible to use.
• Pierre-Andre Crouchet, who provided the final piece of the puzzle for the Yellow Bittern.