American Bedu

While I am visiting my son and family in North Carolina a favorite activity for me and my little Grandson is to look out the window together and watch all the different birds that come to feed at the bird feeders my son has mounted all around his home.  He has differing types and sizes of birdfeeders so we get to see a variety of differing kinds of birds from finches, robins, blue jays, red cardinals to the smallest and fastest birds of all, the hummingbirds.  The birds are so accustomed to being fed and eating from the feeder that if the food in the feeder starts to get low some of the birds will actually peck at the windows to remind my son to refill their food!

Now by comparison I was speaking with one of my friends from Jeddah.  She is also an American and married to a Saudi and like me, enjoys watching and feeding the birds.  However she has noticed that while birds will come to her yard they will not eat from the feeders.  Instead the birds will pick up and eat seeds from the ground.  This made us wonder whether the birds were reluctant to come to the hanging feeder due to the lack of trees and foliage.

As a follow up to our conversation I became curious about bird feeding and bird watching in Saudi Arabia.  Were there any special places or areas to go to and if so, what kind of birds could one expect to see?  To begin with I learned that there are more than 450 different species of birds in Saudi Arabia.  I guess that should not have surprised me but it did.  I had become accustomed to seeing maybe four to five differing kinds of birds around Riyadh so had not given much thought that there would be so many different species!  In fact I discovered that Saudi Arabia is an ideal venue for eco-tourism.

Saudi Arabia’s birds are among the best studied aspects of its wildlife. The Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Arabia (ABBA) project has been in existence for more than ten years and has accumulated much valuable information on the status of the Kingdom’s breeding birds. A publication by BirdLife International of Important Birds Areas in the Middle East, lists 39 sites in Saudi Arabia and acknowledges that this may not represent the entire picture since over 100 sites have been ear-marked by NCWCD for protection and many of these are not well known from an ornithological viewpoint but may merit inclusion at a later date.  This link provides a chart of where to go to watch birds and other wildlife in Saudi Arabia. 

If you are a newcomer to Saudi Arabia and interested in bird watching but not sure where to go or how to get started, you may enjoy the Birding Pal web site where individuals can sign up and be put in contact with others in the Kingdom who also enjoy bird watching.

And I’ll end this post sharing a very personal story.  All of my siblings enjoy birds and all of us have some kind of bird feeder at our homes.  My sister who lives in Florida has many different bird feeders and hummingbird feeders.  She is fortunate that where she lives she has many colorful plants in bloom and hummingbirds are abundant.  Now at one time my mother was staying at my sister’s home.  Although my mother and father smoked until late in life, neither me nor any of my siblings ever smoked.  My mom was still a smoker at the time she was at my sister’s home so my sister advised her that the house rules were any smoking had to take place outside of the house.  My mom was not a very good morning person and first thing she liked to do when she got up in the morning was to have that “wake up” cigarette.  She would put on her pinkest of hot pinks bathrobe and go outside to the yard to have her morning smoke.  Well, one morning she happened to be spotted by the hummingbirds who must have thought they hit the mother lode.  My sister advised at least a dozen hummingbirds were literally swarming around my mother and pecking at her bathrobe while she had one hand cupped around her face to smoke her cigarette and the other hand was trying unsuccessfully to shoo the hummingbirds away!  On the positive side, it was not too long after that incident that my mother finally gave up smoking.