Wander off into the weekend, pals. It's Friday. Be good to each other. - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Black bear" by YellowstoneNPS is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Tree Swallow

Evil demon monster

leucistic cope’s gray tree frog by atreefrogcollective looks pearlescent

Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters, now in their late forties, started photographing birds in their backyard almost a decade ago. They began posting their pictures on social media, eventually visiting marshlands and other sites of vibrant bird activity in the Gaza Strip. They’re not trained biologists, but their work documenting the birds of Gaza was crucial to the publication of that territory’s first bird checklist in 2023. If it weren’t for the Israeli occupation — and now the full-scale war that has killed more than 34,000 people, 72 percent of them women and children, and damaged or destroyed 62 percent of all housing — Gaza would be ideal for birding. Like much of the Middle East, the territory lies under one of the world’s great flyways for millions of migrating birds. Its Mediterranean coast attracts shorebirds. Wadi Gaza, a river-fed ravine and floodplain that snakes its way across the middle of Gaza, is home to more than 100 bird species, as well as rare amphibians and other riparian creatures. In other words, that strip of land is a birder’s paradise. Or it would be a paradise, except that, as the Daily Beast reported a year ago (long before the current war began): “Being a bird-watcher in Gaza means facing endless restrictions. Israel controls Gaza’s territorial waters, airspace, and the movement of people and goods, except at the border with Egypt. Most Palestinians who grew up in Gaza since the closure imposed in 2007, when Hamas seized control from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, have never left the 25-by-7-mile strip.” Gazan birders encounter other barriers, as well. Even if they can afford to buy binoculars or cameras with telephoto lenses, the Israeli government views such equipment as having “dual use” potential (that is, possibly serving military as well as civilian purposes) and so makes those items very difficult to acquire. It took the Sirdahs, for example, five months of wrangling and various permission documents simply to get their birding equipment into Gaza. Getting equipment in was hard enough, but getting out of Gaza, for any reason, has become nearly impossible for its Palestinian residents. Along with most of its 2.3 million inhabitants, the sisters simply couldn’t leave the territory, even before the present nightmare, to attend birding conferences, visit exhibitions of their photography, or receive awards for their work. They were imprisoned on a strip of land that’s about the size of the island in Massachusetts where I’ve been watching birds lately. When I try to imagine life in Gaza today, I sometimes think about what it would be like to shove a couple of million people into this tiny place, chase them with bombs and missiles from one end of it to the other, and then start all over again, as Israel seems to be about to do in the southern Gazan city of Rafah with its million-plus refugees.

May 15, 2024

Water accumulates somewhere, bird dips head into it. Science.

Amsel ♂️ (blackbird) im Akademiegarten im Oberen Schlossgarten, Stuttgart-Mitte.

Bald eagles are sometimes kleptoparasites, meaning they steal their food from other predators.

(Bald eagle, immature plumage)

Blackbird Singing

“Kudu portrait” by Licinia Machado

Alawa, a grey wolf from the Wolf Conservation Center

I see you

Day 836 of posting pictures of elephants.

Source: Songkran Wimolsittchai

A Great-Crested Flycatcher leaps into action.