Wednesday, June 30, 2004

There are a few birds I thought I would have seen by now, but haven't. Chief among them is the White Stork. It could be that my location just doesn't have good habitat.

I was talking to one of our local guys and quizzing him on the Arabic names of various birds and animals. He said the White Stork is called Lak Lak. They nest on the tops of several mosques in a nearby town. As in the west the stork is associated with bringing babies.

Some of the guys started singing me a local song about the stork, a mother and a baby.

A few nights ago I found some huge antlions at our light, they were about 4 inches long. I've also seen another smaller species the same size as the ones I see back at home. There aren't very large numbers of macro moths certainly nowhere near the diversity we see in New England, a few noctuids, some small pyralids, and a handful of geometrids. It could just be my location, a very disturbed man-made wasteland of gravel and sand with small islands of vegetation. I bet the vegetated areas down near the river are better.

Today in my spin around post I saw a Kestrel.

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