37 : Western Reef Heron

Western Reef Heron - Egretta gularis

A trip up our local park today in Al Barsha. The centrepiece of the park is a concrete sided lake which obviously has a purpose in the water treatment and distribution process in Dubai. I have seen various water plants growing in the lake and small fish and it doesn't take long before the birds will show up.

This is the dark "morph" of Western Reef Heron. This particular race is I think "shistacea" which is local to the Arabian peninsula and India and is slightly larger and more blue in its tone that the normally darker and slater grey Gularis. This is tropical heron and I have seen them all round the region in both this and the white form. I have to say its quite useful when they are in their dark form as it makes identification a lot easier. You get a fair number of colour morphs with birds of prey also. I have to say I am not aware of the reasons or why-fors.

There is a tradition in birding where we each take a "local patch" and watch it quite intensively in order to build up a pattern of birds that appear. Its the place you might walk your dog back home or it might be on the drive to work. Realistically its somewhere you can drop into daily when the peak migration season is on to take advantage. In Bill Oddie's memoirs he laments his adopted patch from his youth which was a concrete sided resevoir (I forget the name) but he got to know his Coots and Dabchicks very well over the years. His local patch is now Hamstead Heath and if you're up early you can sometimes bump into him in London. I used to watch a stretch of the Thames when I lived in South London but it was never somewhere I could pop into daily.

I have been thinking about adopting Barsha park as a local patch on the basis that I should be able to drop in regulary as it is close to my home and also it should prove a case in point that in Dubai you never know what will show up. I know its residents by now which I will introduce you to over time - but also on occcasion you do get some nice suprises. I will try to be there to take advantage for this page. I will put up a page to describe Barsha Park as a habitat and then we can drop in there from time to time to see what's about.

Western Reef Heron - Egretta gularis
Al Barsha 1, Dubai
10 March 2010