Camel spiders, warblers, and a return to my old location

Camel spiders (Solifugids) are probably the most infamous animal around here. I have been told that they become huge, pursue and jump on people and camels, eat the flesh of sleeping soldiers, and so on… In fact, we see them very rarely and I don’t know anyone who was ever harmed by one. Like scorpions, they are arachnids but not spiders. This brown camel spider is one of the two species that Ian, a friend from Juneau, caught on the border. It was badly wounded when it was caught, so I was able to hold it in my hand without being harmed (its legs span about the width of my hand and two thirds of its length), and photograph it without having it always try to run underneath my camera.

This small whitish camel spider is much less stereotypical. It is a fascinatingly tough and primitive little creature with the solifugids’ typical huge chelicerae. In this photo, it is tearing apart a poor scarab that we threw at it. Its behavior seems rather easy to predict:
If we throw it an insect, it will attack.
If we put it near shade, it will run to the shade.
If we place a rock next to it, it will burrow itself under the rock by digging sand out with its legs, and periodically turning around to push the sand out like with its jaws acting like the blade of a snowplow.

As for birds, I have been seeing many problematic warblers, including this Upcher’s warbler Hippolais languida that spent hours in the shade underneath our truck in Iraq. The Upcher's warbler was completely unafraid of humans, and I had to photograph it in macro mode as if it were an insect. Other difficult warblers were: bushels of Phylloscopus warblers that I don’t even try to identify anymore, and the gray warbler below. At first I thought it was a Hippolais warbler, then a white-eye, but a thorough review of the field guide suggests that it is in fact a young barred warbler Sylvia nisoria. Just when I thought there was at least one warbler I could easily identify…

As the mission changes, so do our assignments. The latest change within the battalion means that our little group of volunteer for task force Denali has to go back to the same camp which we were assigned to before. So my address will revert to what it was a month and a half ago, and I will be back to working on the border. I will really miss the mission even though it meant we had to spend days at a time out in the desert heat, eating MREs and drinking warm water, away from everything. The greatest treat was getting to sleep out in the desert, under the stars, in almost complete darkness, knowing that scorpions, foxes, camel spiders, huge lizards and other strange creatures were all around us.

More desert animals

Just one day after I had found my first great reed warbler Acrocephalus arundinaceus, I found one in a rather unexpected birdwatching hotspot: inside the shower trailer! We have trailers here that contain about twenty showers and a dozen sinks, and they have nothing in common with the great reed warbler’s natural habitat (you guessed it: reeds!). At first I had misgivings about the wisdom grabbing a camera and starting to snap pictures in a trailer full of guys in varying states of undress, but the birding passion took over. In the end, I got a few good pictures like the one that opens this paragraphs thanks to two of the other soldiers who helped me by getting the bird close to me, and then chasing it out of the showers when I turned the light off to draw it outside. It was nighttime, and I usually get trapped birds out of our buildings simply by turning the lights off and catching them.

Up in Iraq, our truck’s shade lured all kinds of interesting birds, such as a flock of Spanish sparrows Passer hispaniolensis. Spanish sparrows are much more distinctive than I had expected them to be. I had been scrupulously scanning flocks of domestic sparrows, searching for slightly more striated ones, but the striation on the male is in fact so boldly marked that I identified them in flight. The other “new” bird I saw this past week is the desert lark Ammomanes deserti, which was a rather un-excitingly plain bird even compared to the great reed warbler. At least the great reed warbler stands out by its sheer size. The desert lark looks like a cross between the world’s most boring pipit and a non-descript finch.

The most endearing bird in the Iraqi desert so far is the hoopoe lark. Around sunrise, they start to sing a few simple melodies, which are performed during what I would call a “leap-flight.” The hoopoe larks – which have big, black and white wings and sand-colored bodies – leap and fly about two or three meters above the ground and let themselves glide right back down. The amazing thing is that they can do this leap-flight almost perfectly vertically. The effect is great at five in the morning, like dozens of tiny singing geyser spurts that gradually stop as the weather becomes unbearably hot. The shade of our trucks is also used by such birds as: feldegg and thunbergi yellow wagtails, masked shrikes, red-backed shrikes, a spotted flycatcher, rufous bush robins like the one in this picture (taken near my barracks back in Kuwait), and some redstarts.

I had a lot of fun turning over rocks and chunks of Gulf War vehicles to look for animals like this large emperor scorpion that is trying to bury itself to get away from me. I was surprised to find out that they have organs under their abdomens that look exactly like the gills on the underside of crabs. Other interesting desert animals are desert foxes, praying mantises that have a wide abdomen (and are dark, as opposed to the almost white ones in Kuwait), spiny-tailed lizards, desert monitors, hordes of migrating dragonflies, etc… We even saw a black-and-white dog, which seemed uninterested in us even though it was located a good twenty kilometers away from the nearest Bedouin camp and the temperature was already above a hundred degrees with no water or shade. One desert fox got overly interested in me while I was sleeping (I just slept in the sand), and had to be chased away by a watchful gunner who saw it and threw a water bottle at it.

Finally, there has been some controversy lately regarding soldier’s rights to post information on blogs while deployed to a war zone. The policy has not changed, and I have applied myself to abide by it. What I do is not “combat blogging,” as it is sometimes called even by the army. I try to be as vague as possible when it comes to operations, and as accurate as possible when it comes to birds and flowers. There should be no issue.

The desert is not as green on the other side of the electrified fence...

We finally started our mission inside Iraq. Kuwait is interesting, of course, but after six months many of us were sick of being restricted to the border and eventless regions of Kuwait. Of course, we were in the desert part of Basra province the entire time, so the landscape was very similar to that of northern Kuwait – just a little more arid and with fewer, poorer people who tend their own livestock instead of hiring south Asians to do it for them. Most of the people we see are either Bedouin herders, or oil workers. At times we only see a single vehicle in an entire hour. This old Iraqi man was stopped at one of our traffic control points, and I gave him a bottle of water.

The most interesting birds were the raptors: I saw a pallid harrier, some black kites, an unidentified eagle, a buzzard that was probably a long-legged buzzard, two unidentified eagles, a marsh harrier, a few kestrels, and one saker falcon. Otherwise the area was largely devoid of bird life. There are beetles, long-legged ants that make long trails on the surface of the desert, and tiny plants. Most of the plants in the driest parts of the desert are species that are common in more fertile areas, except their growth is stunted so that they only reach a size of about two inches in diameter. For example, the plantain and composite flower in this picture are normally about ten inches high in most parts of Kuwait. Other common dwarf plants are three centimeter high Neurada Procumbens, and four centimeter high Haloxylon salicornicum (which is the dominant shrub in northern Kuwait).

We were visited by some high-ranking officers, who were dropped off and picked up at one of our traffic control points by a UH-60 blackhawk helicopter. Our element must have looked rather bizarre from the air: a few heavily armed trucks and soldiers shutting down a small desert road, even though there seems to be no one around. We did get some interesting comments from a senior officer, who mentioned the possibility of a withdrawal mandated by Washington, the tenuous nature of our relationships with the Kuwaiti and Iraqi governments, and other long-term, large-scale concerns. Although such news are always in the media, I cannot really get myself to believe that they are more than empty threats, criticisms and rumors. The sheer scale of the US military apparatus in the Iraqi theater makes any end to this campaign seem like a dim prospect at best. In fact, when I see congressional timelines for troop pullout I cannot help but think of the staggering amount of materiel we would have to abandon there because there weren’t enough containers, planes, trucks, aircraft and ships available.

This blog’s quote is really just a word that I liked. According to the magazine The Economist of April 14, Arab political dissenters who spread their views through blogs call themselves “pyjamahideen.”