An Israeli-Palestinian birding team

An Israeli-Palestinian team wins, and gives up, Israel’s first ever international birding competition.

By SHULA KOPF
Ornithologist Yossi Leshem participates in the ‘Champion of the Flyway’ international birding competition in Eilat in early April (photo credit: NATI SHOHAT / FLASH 90)
Ornithologist Yossi Leshem participates in the ‘Champion of the Flyway’ international birding competition in Eilat in early April
(photo credit: NATI SHOHAT / FLASH 90)
The car of the Israeli-Palestinian birding team arrives at the salt marshes north of Eilat with the sound of spitting gravel and a cloud of dust. The Palestine Sunbirders, as they call themselves, started the race at 3:30 a.m. in chilling desert temperatures, always a good omen for a morning happily chirping with birds.
Twelve hours later after sharing information with some other teams, they are surprised to discover that they have a good shot at winning Israel’s first ever “Champions of the Flyway” international birding competition.
The new bird race is based on the American “Big Day” concept. Starting at midnight, 14 international teams and 10 Israeli teams of top birders, the kind who can identify species just by their song, have spread out in a triangular perimeter of several hundred kilometers of breathtaking bleached desert vistas, stretching from Eilat in the south to the Arava Junction in the north. Seventy-five competitors in total, their aim is to find, identify and log as many species of birds as possible during a 24- hour period. At night one can identify birds by their song. The team with the largest number of species wins.
“The exciting thing is that this is the first year of the race, so no one has any idea of what the winning strategy is, but we suppose that we have it,” Rob Jollie a member of the British Digital Spring team tells The Jerusalem Report, while he scans the horizon with his binoculars. “There are so many habitats and Eilat is such a fantastic place for birds that it’s difficult to decide where to go first and how much time to spend in each place.”
The goal of the race is to raise money for a conservation project and to put Israel on the radar of the $2.5 billion global bird tourism industry.
“Probably more people know Israel for hi-tech than for birding,” says Dick Newell, a veteran birder and also a member of the Digital Springs team. “They don’t know how spectacular it is for birding. Israel is up there at the top. It’s the best place for the sheer volume and variety of bird species. It’s a must for a serious birder watcher,” he tells The Report enthusiastically, Hoping to peck a few crumbs of the bird-watching tourism industry, the government has recently allocated 40 million shekels to develop a network of bird-watching centers throughout the country. Birding is one of the most popular hobbies in the world and bird enthusiasts make three million international birding trips annually. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are 51.3 million birders in the United States alone.
“Even if only a small percent of bird lovers come to Israel, that would be a significant number,” Pini Shani, director of overseas marketing for the Tourism Ministry explains to The Report. “It’s always going to be a niche market, but we see a great opportunity to develop a natural resource.”
Israel lies along one of the world’s largest migration routes with over 500 million birds that pass through a geographical bottleneck on their way between their breeding grounds in Europe and their winter quarters in Africa.
The Syrian African Rift (4,200 miles from Turkey to Mozambique), a major flight corridor, creates a tube-like wind channel, a natural flyway that funnels over 300 species of birds into the country’s airspace. The birds land and the next morning they take off again.
“Israel’s location at the junction of three continents is a disaster from a political point of view, but from a birding point of view it is heaven,” says Prof. Yossi Leshem, former CEO of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and an ornithologist for the past 40 years. “Birds don’t care about politics or international borders,” he relates to The Report.
Per square mile Israel has one of the highest concentrations of bird traffic in the world, he says.
The teams participating in the race raised more than $60,000 for conservation projects, half of which will go to fight illegal hunting of birds in Georgia. A significant portion of the migration route is through countries where hunting is widespread. Danger lurks in Cyprus, Malta, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt among others. There is almost no bird hunting in Israel where the Jewish population does not have such a tradition. There are 5,000 hunting licenses in Israel compared with 400,000 in Lebanon, says Leshem adding, “In the Middle East Israel is a safe haven for birds.”
The race takes place on April 1 right at the peak of the spring migration from Africa to Europe which begins in mid-March and continues for about a month. After they have flown some 1,800 miles across deserts for 20 to 40 hours, the hungry and exhausted birds funnel into Eilat. The seablite vegetation in the few salt marshes that remain north of Eilat provides their first good meal.
By the time the Israeli-Palestinian team arrives at the salt marshes in the late afternoon, they have already logged more than 130 species.
In Sde Boker, 190 kilometers north of Eilat, which they reached at first light, a Common Linnet sang to them perched on a wire like a sentry, its chest puffed out. A Yellowhammer Lark flew overhead with a flutter of chestnut brown wings richly streaked with black.
An orchard of pistachio trees verily swarmed with a variety of birds; Nightingales, Flycatcher Brick and warblers of all kinds. A Song Thrush found respite on an olive tree branch.
But best of all, a drive in a nearby wadi flushed out a rare species of Warbler, which gave the team a sense that today everything was possible.
The Sunbirders left Sde Boker with a haul of about 40 species checked on their list.
Now, hours later at the salt flats, there are only some three hours left of birdable light and the Sunbirders plan to visit two or three more important habitats. They are tired, having walked some 15 kilometers in the desert heat, but they are filled with the urgency a runner feels approaching the finish line. Among the teams that have entered the race are some crack birders but the toughest competition is the Cornell lab of ornithology eBirders team.
They have never lost a race. The Cornell team dashed out exactly at midnight with a clear strategy carefully mapped out during the three-days of pre-race scouting trips.
“They used a stopwatch to measure driving distances. They marked every bird they saw on GPS. They divided every hour into 20 minute segments and knew exactly where they would be at any given moment,” relates Noam Weiss, of the three-member Israeli-Palestinian team.
“They had noticed, for example, that the Brown Booby comes to Eilat with the last light and lands on certain buoys. They sent someone to see on which buoy the bird fell asleep and, exactly at midnight, they went straight to the beach, trained the telescope on the buoy and identified the bird by its shadow. Right off they nabbed a rare bird. We also had a plan but we didn’t stick to it.”
So now, with the end in sight, the slightest delay could cost the Sunbirders the trophy.
The last thing they need is a journalist tagging along to distract them. I get into their car and offer them nuts. “We don’t eat. We don’t breathe,” says Weiss curtly.
The Palest inian team member, Sa’ed A-Shomal, is a birder from Bethlehem working with the Palestinian wildlife society. The two met in joint Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian wildlife protection workshops. Weiss is director of the Tel Aviv Birding Center.
“The hardest thing of the whole competition was getting Shomal into Israel. I applied a month in advance for permission for him to enter and it was issued an hour before I was going to pick him up in Bethlehem,” says Weiss. The two communicate in Arabic, which Weiss learned in his army post on the Allenby Bridge border crossing with Jordan and later at university.
The third member of the team is Weiss’s wife of two months, Jessica Schackermann, project coordinator for the Hanns Seidel Foundation, which funds environmental cooperation in the region.
The three are out of the car standing near the salt flats, their practiced eyes on high alert scanning the water, the banks, the sky.
We hear the wind picking up when suddenly Weiss cries out with urgency, “Spoonbill, Spoonbill.”
“Where?” The other team members spot the longlegged wading bird and Schackermann quickly jots down the name in a notebook.
The competition rules state that each species logged must be seen or heard by at least three members of a team. Despite the pressure the Sunbirders decide to drive around the salt flats slowly so as not to miss any bird.
Only five percent remains of the extensive Eilat salt marsh that had once spread over an area of 12 square kilometers before succumbing to the human tendency to pave over wild areas and cover them with hotels and shopping malls. At their first stop the team spots a Greater Sand Plover, gulls, flamingoes, a little ringed plover, a variety of ducks, thick-billed terns and a Black-Tailed Godwit.
Weiss, equipped with binoculars, calls out the names. Shomal looks through the telescope.
Schackermann confirms.
They spot five or six more species before they meet other teams, who have converged on the water. Weiss gives the Dutch team a tip and points out a Shelduck. “Every bird counts – literally, but generosity is always the way to win. If it will be the difference of winning or losing by one bird it will be because of me,” says Weiss, a birder from age 10. “Besides, I’m Israeli, I know the terrain and it’s only fair to help.”
After they finish their round of the salt flats there is no time to lose. I jump out of the car quickly not to detain them and they disappear in a cloud of dust.
Turns out the Shelduck didn’t make a difference.
Even before the award ceremony the next day, the Sunbirders realize by putting out feelers that they probably won. They had logged a whopping 169 species.
They spend another night of insomnia.
“We stayed up discussing the situation and decided the trophy cannot stay in Israel,” Weiss tells The Report in a telephone interview several weeks after the race.
“There is the Israeli factor of knowing the terrain and having the experience in the field that gives an advantage. If the other teams know of a certain place where they might see a bird, I have five other places in mind. We decided we would give the trophy to the first team that has no Israeli participants.”
The Sunbirders yielded their first place as Champions of the Flyway to the Cornell lab eBirders, who had collected four species less. The British Digital Spring team came in third. All together, all the teams had spotted a cumulative total of 249 species.
“We were a bit s ad. We h ad worked s o hard and now we were giving the prize away,” says Weiss. “The Americans were happy, and they were also generous and decided to share the title with us. We gave it up and got it back.”
Several weeks after the race Weiss has a thought that gives him a sense of wonder. “I can’t stop thinking that it’s an amazing coincidence that a bird came so far from Africa to Europe and we met on the way.”
Chances are the bird will be back in autumn. 


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