We had a great time in Jordan and Israel. I was so happy to have taken my Cabela's 8 x 42 Binoculars along. And many folks on the bus were jealous because I was the onlyone seeing stuff up close. The guides didn't really like me because my attention was always wandering around the area looking for birds and other details. Binoculars are the tour guides' worst enemies and you will never see them on the packing list.
So, I honestly did not know what I was going to be seeing. When we got to Amman it looked so dry that I honestly didn't think we'd see any birds at all. The whole of both Countries is packed with common sparrows. So many that i think this is what God fed to Moses' people in the desert. Sparrows are everywhere and one gets sick of seeing and hearing them. Picking through the sparrows to find real birds is the job at hand.
Then at the Karak Crusader Castle
I saw a little bird from about 200 yards away. I thought the bird had something in its beak.
So I ran toward it and got a good look at the best bird in the Middle East in my opinion, the Hoopoe.
Unbelievable! And when it flies, the black and
white striped wings are horizontally striped.
And then we went to Wadi Rum, where Lawrence of Arabia campaigned and where the movie was filmed. I saw some Tristam's grackles. Great songs.
Crossing the border
into Israel, I saw a
Common Kingfisher above a canal,
and a Crested Lark in the dust near the border fence.
Israel is chock full of water (they get 80 percent of the water from the Sea of
Gallilee/River Jordan
and Jordan gets 20 percent). So there are lots more birds in
Israel. In Joppa I saw the first of many Palestine Sunbirds.
I thought they were hummingbirds but they don't hover. I looked up hummingbirds online and found out a VERY interesting factoid. Hummingbirds exist o
nly in the Americas! Wild huh?
Then on Mount Carmel I saw the first of many Eurasian Jays.
And then later in
the day in the Valley of Armegeddon, I saw some Kestrals. Everywhere in the Country are Hooded crows, the second most common bird.
In that valley there are so many Kibutz's, or Communistic Farms, and there are fish ponds everywhere too. An amazing show of water in such a dry place. But there were so many birds around the ponds, especially Spur-winged Plovers.
At the Sea of Galilee I saw a European Goldfinch
and many
Yellow-vented Bulbols (at Capernaum),
a Squacco Heron
on the lake, and a European Greenfinch
on the Mount of the Beatitudes.
At the Jordan River, we were blessed to watch three Pied Kingfishers,
right next to the group discussing Jesus' baptism, and then one very pretty White-breasted Kingfisher.
As we traveled up to Jerusalem I saw many pairs of Red-ringed Parakeets.
Once in Jerusalem, the Masked Shrike's increased in numbers.
And then the highlight of the trip.
Coming back from Bethlehem, through the security
wall at the check point, we stopped in a hillside olive grove. I saw a flash of color even before I got off the bus. And was rewarded with a group of ten, yes ten European Bee-eaters, sitting on the power lines above the olive tress, eating bees, of course. They were beautiful.
There were many many more birds but these were the highlights.
rieties. About 14 American White Pelicans, 
dozens of Canadian geese, 
s unprepared for how easy it would be to see birds and then identify them. Jenna had gotten me a laminated sheet of Costa Rican Birds and Animals before the trip and my hope of seeing such varieties and colors ran high. Jenna agreed that a trip to Cabela's was in order and we got a nice pair of 8 X 42 binoculars (Cabela's Brand, rubber coated). After our first night spent in San Jose, we drove through the mountains on the way to the coast and stopped at a hotel with a short cloud fores
t hike. We were totally inside a cloud. We saw some hummingbirds and then a Cherrie's Tanager. 
At the end of the walk, I saw something hopping around through the tree roots. It was a huge bird, like a pheasant. Long black-and-white-striped tail feathers. Copper-colored body. I showed Jenna as it hopped through the trunks and roots. I commented that it looked more like a squirrel than a bird. It was a Squirrel Cuckoo. Looks like a squirrel, huh. Anyway, then we drove off to the coast, but I was officially hooked for the remainder of the trip.
d for a while, taking turns with the sets of binoculars. Here is a close up of one.
he next day and I saw the first of many Great Kiskadees, Baltimore Orioles, Great-tailed Grackles and Clay-colored Robins. And, of course, dozens of Black-Headed Turkey Vultures.
On the beach I saw two large Brown Boobies (birds), 4 soaring Magnificent Frigatebirds, bunches of Brown 
Pelicans diving for fish and two Osprey. 
tiful black crests on their foreheads. (I would still shoot them and count them on my 12 and 20 Club tally - they are pests. One even was stealing packets of mustard and butter from tables in a restaurant and was very artful at carving through the foil top to extract the butter.)
We went off to the dry forests to do some canopy zip lines on Saturday afternoon, and on the way I saw what I thought were some parrots, but the bus was too bumpy to confirm. I had already seen pairs of parrots flying, but hadn't seen any resting. I did see a Green Kingfisher at a
rests along the coasts are so dry that the leaves all drop. Great for sighting birds. I saw yellow-throated Euphonias, seven orange-fronted parakeets, a big gr
ay and rose colored tree pigeon, called the Ruddy Pigeon, and then I came over a rise into a little greener area, with some grasses. I saw eight or nine of the strange
st birds I have ever seen. Their eyes were so big it was almost creepy. Their backs were greenish-blue-black in that translucent mix that shimmers a bit 
and they had these huge eyes and they had little white corners on their tails. Then one turned around, and they were bright yellow breasted with striped white and black tails. Beautiful. Violaceous Trogons. I just turned off the car and watched from twenty feet away. They slowly worked their way over the next rise. As I watched and listened in the humid Easter afternoon, I heard a big howl and I saw a Howler Monkey eating some kind of tree fruit on the other side of the road from the birds. After a bit, I drove another 50 feet and sat waiting to see if the Trogons would come back. I saw some movement on a huge trunk and saw and watched a Lineated Woodpecker for about
twenty minutes. On the way back I saw a troupe of about ten Howler Monkeys and then a group of maybe twenty fighting and chirping parakeets. An amazing two-and-a-half hours.
And on our way back to San Jose, we saw what we thought were three Three-toed Sloths hanging from some tree branches. A great trip. For the little time I spent looking for birds, I saw 37 different species.