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...

BIRD RINGING FELLOWSHIP IN NORTHEASTERN TURKEY: SEP 1-NOV 15

Travel fellowship and a stipend for a licensed ringer at northeastern Turkey’s Aras River Ornithological Research Station, home to 302 bird species Eastern Turkey Bird Monitoring Project run by the University of Utah and KuzeyDoga Society will provide a fellowship to a licensed bird ringer with Palearctic...

OSME 43rd Annual General Meeting

We will be holding this digitally via Zoom on Saturday June the 19th2021 from 14.00 BST (13.00 GMT) for a maximum of an hour. Copies of the draft minutes of the 42nd AGM and the Draft  Trustee...

The OSME online Summer Meeting: 12th June 2021

We will again be holding our Summer Meeting online and it is free to attend and open to all. The full programme is now available here The meeting will be held using Zoom, and please register as...

Raptor Count Lebanon – call for volunteers

Once again OSME is teaming up with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL) to repeat the successful count of migrating soaring birds in autumn 2019 made with the help of BirdLife Sweden and...

Dates for your diary

OSME Virtual Summer Meeting We are delighted to be holding another online summer meeting that will feature a range of presenters from across the region. This will take place on Saturday 12 June 2021 at 10:30am BST...

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....

Arabic field guide App – new iOS update

Our free Arabic App was launched in April 2018 and so far has been downloaded almost 6000 times. This is an encouraging start and working with the NatureGuides, the App designers, we’ve made some improvements which we...

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...