For my second day in Eilat, I got a taxi to drop me off at the entrance road to Amram's Pillars, another site I'd never managed to reach before. Having seen no wheatears whatsoever the previous day, my first birds were Hooded and Mourning Wheatears, with several singing White-crowned Black Wheatears later on. I took a good couple of hours to reach the campground, where some other birders who were on their way out had told me they'd seen my target species. Once there, though, all I found was a large group of Trumpeter Finches, so I continued further along the road to the junction with the next hiking trail. Here, I started to hear faint calls coming from the cliffs and began scanning. Suddenly, I found a big, fat, frosted raspberry of a male Sinai Rosefinch just sitting there on the cliff-face. I then noticed some females/immatures hiding in the crevices and eventually had five of them come down and feed.
This was my most wanted bird of the trip since I'd only ever had a brief, distant glimpse of a small group way back in 2009, so I was relieved to finally remove the unwanted bvd-label from this species. After that, it was time for the long slog back through the desert to the nearest bus-stop, although I did break it up by having a look at the km20 saltpans, where three male Wigeon were a bit of a surprise since I didn't realise they migrate all the way down into Africa.
