gryllosblog   Gryllo's (aka Ian Lewis') blog. All things to do with travel, wildlife especially birds, history, architecture and anything else that interests me.

We arrived at Tel Aviv at 0530 in the morning of the 27th. We drove straight to Beer Sheva and booked into our hotel. Much of Beer Sheva is dominated by high rise buildings, like the hotel that this picture was taken from.

Unable to find our first birding destination, the local sewage lagoons, in desperation we left the main highways and took the first side road we found. This led to a modern art memorial to Israeli soldiers who fell in the 1948 war.

Virtually the first birds of the trip were these European Bee-eaters on the wires

Amazingly this random stop produced a real goody – two Great Spotted Cuckoos. Although they might have still been on migration, the pair were observed copulating, so may have been local breeders. This species normally parisitises Magpies, but this species is absent in the Negev, so perhaps it lays its eggs in Hooded crows nests instead.