News from the Eastern population

Wonderful news from the Eastern population. After the new activity recorded last February 8th, Odeinat started moving North. Since 16th, in few days crossed Bab el-Mandeb, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and arrived to Syria!!

No signal yet from Salama, which is worrying as other years she re-started transmitting before these dates.

EWNHS

Other good news came from Ethiopia. Our colleagues from the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society (EWNHS), our BirdLife Partner, have been checking last week the area frequented by wintering NBI. They were able to find three birds. Two of them unringed (maybe same birds as appeared unexpectedly last year by the same area, perhaps Syrian juveniles from 2007 that have yet to return to the breeding grounds) and one ringed bird, either Zenobia or Salama.

Joe Beale and NBI

This is a Joe Beale finepen drawing of a Northern Bald Ibis. He draw it for Summersdale book Was Beethoven a Birdwatcher? A Bird's eye History of the World, by David Turner, appeared in 2011.

Joe works with fineline pen and watercolour pencil in books, magazines, TV, ... His interests include mainly birds and other wildlife, but also gothic and ghostly issues, as shown by the name of his ghost blog. 

Ralph Steadman's view on NBI

Northern bald ibis is a highly iconic bird, and his image has been largely reproduced by many artists.

This impressive image is an artwork by Ralph Steadman (renowned for his political and social caricatures, cartoons and picture books) for the project Ghosts of gone birds. This is a huge creative project involving more than 120 artists to encourage preservation of bird species through raising awareness and funds for  BirdLife International's Preventing Extinctions programme.

Odeinat, transmiting again!

Odeinat, one of the two Syrian ibis which is monitored by RSPB, is equiped with a satellite tag that stopped working on November 2011. It started sending information again last February 8th, from an area North to Jijiga, in Ethiopia, a place that Odeinat has been visiting before last October. On 16th he transmitted again from a nearby site.

New breeding season approachs

NBI start to frequent the breeding areas since the beginning of February, but visits are now much more frequent and some started bringing material to the nests.

Aylal is constantly moving between a coastal area north to Agadir up to the Tamri colony and neighbour fields.