More birds!

I have been taking too many pictures to post all the interesting bird pictures, so I am limiting myself to the ones I really like. The gray moths were still out in large numbers this morning, which might explain why a few birds appear to have stayed on the border over the last couple of days. Those moths are about a half inch to an inch long, and they remain motionless on every kind of surface with their wings folded so that they look like debris. They will not move even when caught. A couple of them landed on me, and I had to flick them off to get rid of them. Almost all the birds I saw today were feeding on those moths.

I saw the following unusual birds: two blue rock thrushes, five blue-cheeked bee-eaters, my first-ever Menetrie’s warbler (Sylvia mystacea), and a ruff. I also caught a very strong and quick dung beetle that looked like the Egyptian sacred dung beetle.

This blog is getting invaded by bird pictures, so I am only posting a photo of the ruff with a moth wing stuck to its beak, one of a stonechat, and one of a black-eared wheatear that I am adding to the “wheatear special” I posted two days ago. I am getting better at wheatears, but still not good enough to identify them without a guidebook.

In other news, I competed in a “leg press” competition that consisted in pushing 150% of one’s own weight one hundred times as fast as possible up a 45 degree incline with the legs alone. It is much harder than it looks, and I only placed within my weight class. All the overall winners were big guys with short, stout legs who made us skinny people look quite feeble indeed. Some of them got their one hundred repetitions in less than half the time I took.