Eilat day 4

Spurred on by my success of the previous day, I took the early (06h30) bus to Uvda valley, an extremely remote and extensive wadi which potentially held at least five more lifers for me.  Before arriving in Eilat, I had no idea this area could even be reached by public transport but Noam's excellent directions convinced me to give it a go, especially since I was told there were lots of Temminck's Larks around.  I was thus hopeful of finding at least one new species but, once there, the plain seemed totally devoid of life, as is often the case in the desert.  The first bird I saw was a Hoopoe Lark, a highly sought-after species I'd only seen once before, although it took me quite a while to work out what it was in the early morning light.  I then found a swath of green stretching across the valley which was alive with wagtails, Stonechats, Desert Larks and Mourning Wheatears. Here, I spotted a small, black wheatear perched atop a bush and immediately noticed a more compact profile, more rounded head and shorter bill compared to the more elongated, almost Blue Rock Thrush-like profile of the many immature White-crowned Black Wheatears I'd seen over the past two days.  It soon dropped down from the bush and flashed white at the bases of the primaries, leaving me in doubt that I was watching a Basalt Wheatear!  This is an extremely rare and little-known taxon with an estimated population of just a few hundred pairs restricted to the basalt desert of southern Syria and northern Jordan, a very small percentage of which (probably less than 10 individuals) overwinters in a few scattered and isolated localities in southern Israel.  It is currently considered a subspecies of Mourning Wheatear but may well be raised to species status soon, so was a semi-lifer.  As exciting as it was, I still hadn't found any of my target species and it was already very hot out on the exposed plain so I pressed on, conscious of the need to get to somewhere with shade as the temperature rapidly approached 30°C.  Despite the reports, however, the only larks I could find were Desert and lots of Crested, so I reluctantly headed back to Eilat, where I could only muster the energy for a short visit to North Beach in the late afternoon, finally managing to identify some of the gulls as Heuglin's.  This is another taxon in limbo since it is either a distinct species or a Siberian subspecies of Lesser Black-backed Gull, depending on which authority one follows.

A desert in the desert; female Desert Wheatear which took me far too long to identify!