Category: Guest Blogs

The southern marshes of Iraq

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...

Southwest Iran – a Middle East Birding Paradise

Guest blog by Keramat Hafezi Birgani This is a rather different blog to those normally published on the OSME website. Such a delightful, comprehensive account of the wildlife of a very special and little-known region of the...

Encounters with Pale Martins in Saudi Arabia

A guest blog by Gregory Askew On January 15, my daughter and I were out at Al Asfar Lake in Al Ahsa, in eastern Saudi Arabia conducting the first of a series of shorebird surveys for 2021....

Raptor Conservation in Oman

A guest blog by Maïa Sarrouf Willson about Oman’s efforts to conserve raptors The Sultanate of Oman is home to 39 species of raptors that occur as passage migrants, winter visitors or resident breeders. These include 21...

Conservation is Syria is thriving

A guest blog by Nabegh Ghazal Asswad on behalf of the Syrian Society for the Conservation of Wildlife The Syrian Society for the Conservation of Wildlife (SSCW) is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), concerned with the conservation of...

A Double-MEGA-twitch in Lebanon

Guest blog by Fouad Itani Lebanon has been in the news a lot in the past few years, a refugee crisis following the war in Syria, on-going economic crises and the depreciation of the Lebanese pound, a...

Turkey’s Largest Egyptian Vulture Breeding Area

Guest blog by Şafak Arslan of Doga The Egyptian Vulture is globally threatened and among the species in most rapid decline across its range including the Eastern Europe populations. Previous studies by Doga (the BirdLife Partner in...

Steppe-Whimbrel

Finding Steppe Whimbrel in Abu Dhabi

Guest blog by Oscar Campbell – with thanks to Simon Lloyd The start of it all. It was this image that really got us thinking seriously that we might, at last, have got the cigar. The underwing...

Helping European Rollers in Northern Cyprus

A guest blog by Amie Wheeldon on encouraging the re-establishment of European Rollers at breeding grounds in Northern Cyprus The European Roller Coracias garrulus is a charismatic species that was once more abundant in Cyprus, where it...