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2012 Festival morning tour program

During the festival week, Birders visiting on a package will enjoy a free guided minibus service that will visit the best birding hotspots in Eilat and the southern Arava. These tours will be led by experienced guides that will help you get the most out of your morning. Choose from 2-3 different destinations every day. Please make sure to preorder a packed breakfast to enjoy the morning in the field. The morning tours are in small minibuses and rarely exceed 10-15 people per group. Some of the festivals best birds to date were found, and seen on the coach trips. Here is a full table of morning and afternoon tours and a brief description of each.

White-eyed Gull - Larus Leucophtalmus - Jonathan Meyrav

Bimaculated Lark - Melanocorypha calandra

Birdwatching Park, the Eilat Mountains
and sites near Eilat
This tour will leave the hotel early (06:00) and head to the Eilat Birdwatching Park. At the park we will join the ringing and research team in the normally closed research area. Here we will follow and help the ringers and scientists with their daily tasks of extracting and ringing the hundreds of fresh migrants. We will naturally learn about some species in the hand and enjoy the richness of the park's Avifauna. We will also hear about the park's ecological projects and the important role it plays for northbound migrants.  

At around 08:00 the shuttle bus will leave the park and pass back through the hotel, before continuing to the Eilat mountains. Visitors are free to either get off the bus and enjoy the rest of the morning on their own, or continue with the tour to the mountains.

At the Eilat Mountains we will search for some resident species as we wait for the raptor migration to start. We will then spend the rest of the morning scrutinizing the stream of raptors overhead.

Once we get our fill of the soaring birds, or when migration slows down, we will head back down to the valley and visit some of the more productive sites before we head back to the hotel around 13:00  

Desert morning, Lotan and Neot Smadar
This tour will focus on desert areas north of Eilat. We will leave the hotel early (6:00) and head to a remote desert canyon for some desert specialties like Wheatears, Desert Larks and Sinai Rosefinch. 

After everyone gets good views of the desert birds we will head north to Kibbutz Lotan. Lotan is well known in birders circles and operates a highly successful Birdwatching center. We will bird the lawns and gardens of the kibbutz and visit the organic garden, swimming pools and more migrant hotspots that have yielded many rarities in past springs. After some herbal tea at Lotan's beautiful tea house we will head up to the southern Negev Plateau to the fields of Neot Smadar. This interesting area holds large numbers of migrants and we will spend the rest of the morning birding the pools, fields and orchards. We should get back to the Hotel around 13:00.

Yotvata fields, Samar and Elifaz, migrant hotspots  
On this tour we will visit the bird rich areas around Yotvata. The area holds some old Acacia scrub, sewage pools and flooded fields. We will spend most of the morning birding the area and then head south to Samar where we will bird the large organic date plantations and productive reservoirs. Time pending we will check other productive areas on the way back to Eilat.

Afternoon tour- K20- North Beach
This relaxed afternoon trip will focus on water birds, Waders, Seabirds and more. The shuttle will leave the hotel in the early afternoon and head north to the K20 salt pans. These extensive pools hold large numbers of Waders, Gulls, Terns and hundreds of Greater Flamingos. We will scope through the waders and search for exciting migrants. After K20 we will head south and bird the fields and date plantations near Eilat. From here we will slowly work our way to the North beach where we will wrap up the day with a sea watch. As the North Beach is a 5 minute walk from the hotel, those who chose can walk back to the hotel when they please.  

Afternoon tour – Passerines and migrant hotspots
This relaxed afternoon trip will focus on Passerines and other migrants. We will visit some of the parks and gardens around Eilat that act as great migrant magnets. Some very rare and interesting species have been found in the past within minutes from the hotel.