Ringing with Darren the Birder

I was born in Staffordshire in the Midlands of England, as a lad I was a punk rocker. I’ve always liked birds. I traveled the world for several years and met an Israeli girl in Nepal, we stayed in touch.  I was in Syria in 2002,

I thought I would pop over to Israel to see her, that was my introduction to this country. I returned to England to study ecology then came back to Israel three years later to make a family with Hadas. Today we have three kids, Ayala [13], Noga [10], and Jack [6]. She had just moved to Sde Boker to work at the local high school.  At first I took any job that was available, mostly as a lab technician at the university here, but by degrees I was able to find work in my field.  I have four jobs now: I am a chef at the local pub, I am making a survey of birds at the local solar power station, I work at an ecology center in the adjacent town and I ring birds for the SPNI.  I work a 67 hour week and by my reckoning 60% of it is spent with birds.

The work I do at the power station is to evaluate the impact of the solar tower on bird life.

It’s a three- year project which I have just started and my initial impression is that the impact is small.  I have found one dead bird (feathers were burnt and he fell out of the sky) and one injured bird with burnt feathers (now recovering at Ramat Gan Safari Park).

As a birder I’m lucky because Israel is at the southeastern tip of the Western Palearctic and we get all the desert species here: 5 varieties of sand grouse, the McQueen’s Bustard which are very hard to find, they nest just down the road at Nitzana (below)…

… and my personal favorite, the Bush Robin (below)

In addition, Sde Boker and its surrounding cliffs has the biggest concentration of vultures (Griffin and Egyptian) in Israel

The best of my four jobs is ringing birds. In the first place I’m actually handling birds and that beats everything.  Secondly I am working alone, and thirdly I am outdoors.  It works like this: I set up nets in a line to a height of three meters and stand back.  Birds fly into the nets and get caught up.  I run to free them, I place a ring on the bird’s leg and then release them, it takes a couple of minutes.  I can do as many as 200 birds in a morning. Each ring has a code (IBRC) and a number consisting of one letter and six digits.  I go home and feed the numbers into a central computer.  If the bird already has a ring I just log on and find out where the bird came from, it’s magic.

Here is a picture of a long-eared owl that I ringed and released a few years ago. People can come and watch me ringing birds and they can get to release the birds themselves.  I do it most mornings, I ask for a contribution of 100 shekel per family which goes to upgrading the ringing station, children are welcome.

For reservations please call Darren on 0522 485 604

or

email: dazpunk77@gmail.com

Darren Burns is a fellow Brit, he lives down the road from our guesthouse so I sat him down and asked him a few questions. I have arranged with Darren to join him at the nets one morning soon so I will be reporting the results on this blog.