Natural Selection

We landed in Tamanrasset well after midnight, and with us needing to be escorted to the hotel by the police it was about half two in the morning before we were in our rooms. This led to me not having my camera fully charged, so the pictures are all from round the hotel.

A circuit of the grounds and immediate vicinity produced some nice birds. As well as the Red-billed Firefinches represented by the male above, we also had some other striking species:

Laughing Dove

House Bunting (one I’ve finally got back on Bryony!)

White-crowned Wheatear (without crown)

Fulvous Babbler

Not pictured but also seen and welcomed were Silverbill (with the firefinch a real southern Algeria special in the Western Palearctic), Pale Crag Martin, Blue Rock Thrush and so on.

I will get on to the rest of day’s exploits when we went further afield at another point as I’m a bit knackered. To fill yesterday’s gaps though:

We headed from our hotel towards a salt lake. On the way this Barbary Partridge was rather out of place at the side of the road.

At the salt lake the birds were generally rather distant. We saw about 60 Shelduck, a dozen or so very distant flamingos and some waders including Kentish Plover, Dunlin and Little Stint. A Great Grey Shrike was probably going to be the highlight until a Calandra Lark flew past us calling loudly.

One of our group Adrian suggested relocating to a nearby marsh he saw on the map. This was an inspired suggestion as the birding there was much better. It included Western Swamphens, one of which I saw at close range before it flew off, and Ferruginous Ducks. The departing swamphen picture is terrible, so here is the slightly better Ferruginous Ducks before they also flew when a Marsh Harrier passed.

Continuing the eventful nature of this trip one of the cars, and the one I was in, expired about a hundred miles from the airport. We had to get a taxi, and the taxi driver visited four petrol stations without finding the right fuel for his car (some mixture to make it cheaper). Anyway we got here and it’s started well, more of which another time.