Guest blog by Killian Mullarney and Oscar Campbell Introduction The OSME region is not short of bird species that present those of us who like an identification challenge with something to get our teeth into, ranging from...
Guest blog by Keramat Hafezi Birgani In my previous blog, I wrote about diverse habitats in southwestern Iran making it a hotspot of biodiversity in the Middle East. Since then, my friends and I in the Khuzestan...
Guest blog by Steffen Oppel Over the past years a lot of effort has been invested to protect migratory raptors along the eastern Mediterranean flyway – but are those efforts yielding results? Breeding territories of Egyptian Vultures...
Guest blog by Lyse Mauvais Deep inside the southeastern Syrian Badia, next to the border with Jordan, lies Rukban: a forgotten camp home to 10,000 men, women, and children displaced to the desert by war. Over its...
Guest blog by Joumana Medlej The hoopoe symbolises the spiritual guide nudging the other birds to set out. The “Conference of the Birds” is a 12th-century Sufi poem by Attar of Nishapur, that is a timeless parable of...
Guest blog by Safak Arslan Mersin Study Area (Photo: Mahmut Koyaş) The Egyptian Vulture Neophron percnopterus is globally threatened and one of the species which is in most rapid decline across its range including the Eastern Europe...
Guest blog by Nicholas Rodd About the film: Batumi, Georgia is home to one of the world’s greatest natural spectacles. Over a million birds of prey pass through a narrow bottleneck. Below them, scientists and birders eagerly...
A guest blog by Anna Ten and Valentin Soldatov The idea of tagging Egyptian Vultures was hatched a long time ago by our team, Dr Vladimir Dobrev (BSPB), Dr John Burnside (University of East Anglia), and us...
Guest blog by Robin Snape A Bird Camp on Cyprus had been discussed and planned since early 2020 in collaboration with OSME Youth Development Officer, Tomas Axén Haraldsson. Due to the prolonged pandemic, it has been postponed...
Guest blog by Louis Junior Saad Despite all international birdwatchers cancelling their trips due to Covid and nationwide circumstances, the SPNL Raptor Count Lebanon, was held again at Hammana on Mount Lebanon overlooking the city of Beirut...
Guest blog by Szabolcs Nagy Although the OSME region is dominated by deserts and dry land, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black and Caspian Sea, the Gulf, the Arabian and the Red Sea and the inland wetlands are...
A guest blog by Ali Yahya Ali Mahrous and Salem Abdullah Ali Mohammed Due to the long isolation of the Socotra islands from other regions in the world wonderful wildlife, unique biodiversity and amazing marine life have...
Guest blog by Gregory Askew Prior to November 2017, when I first moved to Saudi Arabia, only six observations of Asir Magpie Pica asirensis, a range-restricted corvid species found in the highlands of southwest Saudi, had been...
Guest blog by Laith Jawad with support from Mudhafar Salim and Salwan Abed This guest blog is by Laith Jawad, editor of a new book: “Southern Iraq’s Marshes Their Environment and Conservation”, published by Springer, Switzerland in...