Cairo, 27th - 29th March

A family holiday to Egypt for the Easter holidays was a nice opportunity to find some new birds.

We started in Cairo, staying in an apartment on Gezira island in the middle of the Nile. City birding in the Middle East can be pretty limited, but it helps when you have a bloody great river running through the middle of it. Most of my birding was from the apartment, which overlooked both the Nile itself and a small park.

The birds were fairly typical. Common Bulbuls, Laughing Dove, Hooded Crow and House Sparrows were the commonest species. Both Ring-necked Parakeet and Alexandrine Parakeet used the park, as did a number of Hoopoe. Black Kites were everywhere in small numbers, as were Pallid Swift. The river was a flyway for several species of heron, particularly Cattle and Little Egrets, Squacco Heron and Black-crowned Night Heron. Pied Kingfisher were quite common, but White-throated Kingfisher was much less so. The first of the Egyptian specialities I found was the cleopatra subcpecies of Little Green Bee-eater.

Little Green Bee-eater, ssp. cleopatra. Only on the edge of the desert in the Cairo area

Hoopoe. Only in the park near the apartment.

Common Bulbul.

A surprise was finding a small population of Alexandrine Parakeet in the park.