Photo Gallery
Photos by Bryan Bland unless otherwise noted
One of the world’s most delightful and charismatic endemics is Moussier’s Redstart found only in NW Africa yet in every habitat there - from mountaintop to beach. Bryan took this photograph thirty years ago when the species was a lifer for him - but he has enjoyed seeing it every year since then.
More choosy in its habitat is the Northern Bald Ibis and Morocco is home to the world’s last viable wild population, so this is always a top target bird - though the excitement of locating one is always tempered by sadness at the thought of its impending extinction.
Morocco offers so many amazingly dramatic and varied landscapes that it has become a favorite location for movie makers including such epics as The Man who would be King.
Ochre-tinted Tafroute in the remote Anti-Atlas mountains is reached by the most impressive circuit imaginable…
Roadside birds could include Red-billed Chough, Barbary Partridge, Rock Sparrow, Blue Rock Thrush, and Golden Eagle.
The bedouin say the white camels can smell the water. A mile beyond this oasis south of Goulmin we usually see a succession of seven species of lark, Lanner, Long-legged Buzzard, Trumpeter Finch and Black-bellied Sandgrouse.
In fact, wherever a spring occurs in the parched deserts of the south, birds congregate. (Beyond our minibus parked top left is an endless expanse of sand, with nothing moving except Hoopoe Lark, Cream-coloured Courser, and Desert and Red-rumped Wheatears.)
A popular feature in recent years has been a pelagic trip in a French-owned catamaran, affording an opportunity to see Great, Cory’s, and Sooty Shearwaters, Storm-petrels (British, Leach’s, Madeiran, and Wilson’s), and Sabine’s Gull.
Previously, seabirds seemed restricted to Yellow-legged Gulls—
—and Audouin’s and Lesser Black-backed Gulls in their hundreds.
Photo: Sam Alexander