A Field Notebook: A day in Kuwait

Monday, 13 February 2023

A day in Kuwait

I'm on my way to Kerala in India, flying with Kuwait airlines, and about a week before we flew we were told that our two hour wait in Kuwait had now been extended to 19 hours! Not to worry though, under Kuwait law, the airline must provide us with a hotel for free, with complementary meals. I immediately spotted an opportunity to do some birding in Kuwait and see a few really special species.

Sounds good except that once in the free hotel you're not allowed to leave it until two hours before your outbound flight because the hotel is still within the airport security zone. So no chance of a few hours touring Kuwait if you take that option. I decided to decline the free hotel and booked the Holiday Inn just outside the airport at my own expense. No problem leaving the airport, I simply went to immigration when I got off the plane and they took my details and gave me a visa. It took about 10 minutes including queueing, and the hotel sent a driver to pick me up.

The next day my flight was at 17:00 and with my hold luggage still somewhere within the depths of the airport waiting to be tranferred to my next flight, I only had hand luggage with me, so no need to check in and no need to be back at the airport until 15:00. So at 06:30 I was picked up at the hotel by a local birding guide, AbdulRahman, and he took me birding for the eight hours or so that I had available. In total we saw 67 species of which 14 were new to me.

The main species that I wanted to see was crab plover and we managed to find a flock of 31 birds on the beach at Sulaibikhat Sports Club. For a full list of species seen today click here (opens in a new window)

Crab plovers are absolutely awesome birds, like avocets with a massive, dagger like bills. The greyer looking birds are 1st winters of which there were about eight in the flock.

Several western reef herons were on the beach and five species of gull, Heuglin's, steppe, Caspian slender-billed and black-headed.

I'm pretty sure that these are steppe gulls with the crab plover. They are darker than Caspian but not as dark as Heuglin's and they also have very yellow bills and yellow legs, unlike Caspian.

This is definitely a steppe gull, too dark for Caspian and the primary pattern is right for steppe gull, plus the bill is very bright.

We did amazingly well for eagles in such a short space of time, with several each of imperial, steppe and greater spotted eagles, including a motorway roundabout which had about eight eagles and a few black kites, including this magnificent juvenile imperial eagle.

What a bird! Photographed quickly from the car parked on the motorway slip road. I wasn't driving!

Imperial, greater spotted and steppe eagle.

Imperial eagle and steppe eagle in flight and greater spotted eagle in the bush.

Adult greater spotted eagle.

Immature steppe eagle.

We did well for wheatears, with desert probably the most common, followed by isabelline.

I was pleased to see this Finsch's wheatear which is a species I have only previously seen in winter in Cyprus.

The rarest wheatear we saw in Western Palearctic terms was this Persian wheatear which was at Kapd reserve. It doesn't look particularly impressive in this photo but when it flies it has a rufous orange lower back, tail and rump, in fact all of the places which would be white on a northern wheatear. It was formerly known as red-rumped wheatear.

Also at Kapd we saw a wonderful male Caspian stonechat Saxicola maurus hemprichii which was far and away the whitest looking stonechat I have ever seen. A really nice bird.

We saw a few namanqua doves at Kapd including this female, but we also saw a male fly over....

...and there were two species of shrike, this Daurian shrike and a couple of Steppe grey.

Two pied kingfishers were at Jahra pools, also a white-throated kingfisher.

White-tailed lapwings are resident at Jahra pools and it was pleasing to see four here and another at Kapd reserve.

This long-tailed duck was only the second ever record for Kuwait. Also at Jahra pools we saw, and heard, a couple of chiffchaffs which apparently are the subspecies Phylloscopus collybita menzbieri.

Night Herons

Black kites are everywhere, AbdulRhaman explained that they are intermediate between western European black kites and black-eared kites.

I need to sort out these gulls, but the darker birds are Heuglin's and the paler birds probably a combination of Caspian and steppe. That's a job for when I get home!