New Site

with lots of demonstrations booked for july and no birds inside the pistacchio plot, i had to try somewhere new, but still inside the village. So it was off to Ben Gurions burial site, which has a nice little park attached to it. ringing used to be good here until all the tamarix was removed. along with eran we put up 6 nets, and relaxed to watch the sun rise over the Zin wilderness, well that was what we hoped but along came the ibex and we had to constantly watch the nets too make sure we didnt trap an unwanted species as i would imagine they would make a fine mess. birds here where still few and far between. but we did manage a couple of bush robins, one of which had recently fledged along with his dad, its mom was a bit wiser and sat on top of the net before flying off. Then when i was coming back from a net round i saw Meidad, who finally made it by 6.45 running to the nets where what i thought must be a blackbird was caught, but to my delight i was wrong and we had a Tristrams Grackle, which are fairly common around here now, but we dont seem to catch any, these being the first since 2007. we had just finished ringing the first, a adult male, when a second female crashed into the same net, which delighted the small crowd of sightseers that were passing. We had only 9 birds in total but this site will have to do for the next month until the migrants start to return.

Tristrams Grackles