34 : Hume's Wheatear

Hume's Wheatear - Oenanthe monacha

Firstly an apology for the picture quality - I will at some stage "upgrade" or supplement. The new camera is on its way. Roll on payday !

My last post was about a bird that needs a little bit of help to thrive in the UAE. Not so today's star. I can almost guarantee that if I take a drive into the desert and find an outcrop of that shattered rugged stone in the blistering heat a bird call reminiscent of walks in the Peak District will float through the haze.

This is a bird limited in its range to the North-West Arabian peninsula and what my Grandad called the "cockpit of Asia" - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan - That general area. I will endeavour to get a better picture but this was snapped I think near Hatta pools on one of our "Agh lets get out of Dubai and the malls and go climb a hill" roadtrips. They are part of the suite of birds that you will find in that arid hilly country where the sandunes give way to mountains and outcrops. There is a large range of mountains running up this thumb part of the Arabian peninsula dividing Oman from Saudi and the UAE. The hills are bigger than anything in Scotland in many places. On a recent trip to the Sharjah Natural history museum I learnt that if you follow these mountains South you will run into 40,000 baboons. Yemen and Saudi might not be a tourists dream but away from disturbance there is some real wilderness. This bird was photographed an hour's drive from Dubai - a little further to get into the really rough stuff.

A Hume's wheatear will stand out perfectly in their black and white plumage and sit up on stones and sing their heart out. Below a picture of typical Hume's wheatear territory - and typical picnic country for my family !

I just found this handsome chap who my wife managed to get a perfect picture of hiding in a stone bank. I have as yet to identify this lizard who was perhaps 30 cm long if you included his tail.

Its worth double clicking on this Lizard to blow him up and admire the camouflage that works down to a scale by scale level. You start to admire lizards and skinks and gekkos when you live out here - makes up for the lack of squirrels !

I wasn't sure what the desert would bring in terms of wildlife. You have to perhaps work a bit harder but it is all out there - perhaps in smaller numbers and tucked away. The apex predator in these hills is the leopard. There are certainly leopard still in Oman and perhaps one or two in the UAE. If in its natural state (without guns in particular !) an area can support leopard then clearly there is going to be a rich and diverse fauna sitting underneath - and that means birds. To see a picture of a leopard click on my Yala link above. Imagine these big cats living in caves in these mountains. If the locals would stop shooting all the gazelles and mountain goats the leopards wouldn't take local livestock. That puts them on a collision course with your hill farmer. There were cheetah in this part of the world until just 40 years ago. How sad is that.

I have seen plenty of birds locally but I do really want to get my walking boots on and dig out some more of the specialists up in these mountains. Also the sand desert itself has some wonderful specialists like the Hoopoe Lark for example which are as exotic in their own way as anything from the rain forest.

When I whine about needing to fly to India or Africa to photograph a hundred different bird species in a day (entirely possible) I am probably best to remind myself that there are plenty of birds on my 'doorstep' - a roadtrip and a Hume's Wheatear is an day well spent.

Hume's Wheatear - Oenanthe monacha
Mountains above Hatta, Oman
March 2010