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Outside Magazine January 2004

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Up in the Air
It seems like all God's creatures have lost their way in the Holy Land. But a few hopeful Israeli and Palestinian conservationists are tracing a new path along the flyways and wildlife corridors of the Jordan Valley—and rediscovering an ancient road map that leads from terror to peace.

By Rob Buchanan


	Birds migrating through the Jordan Valley, including a majestic white stork with a six-foot wingspan. (Courtney Kealy)

THE FIRST DETAINEE seems strangely unperturbed. His breathing is calm and his black eyes gaze unblinkingly, revealing nothing. Still, it doesn't take long to establish his identity. At seven inches tall, with a striking black band behind his eye, a white shoulder patch, and orange tinges on his flanks, he's unmistakably a mature male masked shrike.

"A very aggressive bird, eating eggs and small reptiles," says Sami Backleh, gently extricating the creature from the mist net he rigged a few minutes ago. "An odd thing that I have seen is that it sometimes hangs dead lizards near its nest. Why, I don't know."

Backleh slips the shrike into a cotton sack and closes it with a drawstring. Removing two other birds—an olivaceous warbler and a yellow-vented bulbul—from the 30-foot-long net, he heads for his base of operations: a folding card table in the middle of a weedy lot. There he's joined by two colleagues, Anton Khalilieh and Sameh Darawshi, returning from other nets with a similar harvest of songbirds.

Brushing their breakfast crumbs off the table, the three jeans-clad 24-year-olds set about weighing, sexing, and aging their catch, carefully entering the results in a ledger. To test for body fat, they blow delicately on each bird's chest feathers to expose the soft flesh underneath. This is a key measurement in the study of bird-migration patterns: A hollow at the base of the neck, where fat is stored, means the bird is in need of refueling, while a pronounced protuberance signals that it is ready to move on.

Map It Out

CLICK HERE to view a detailed map of important bird areas and avian migration routes in the Middle East.

The last step is ringing (or banding, as it's known in the United States), in which each bird is fitted with a small metal anklet. Backleh holds one up for my inspection before crimping it on the shrike's foreleg. It's just a little aluminum clip stamped with an identification code and the words WILDLIFE PALESTINE.

Wildlife in Palestine? To those steeped in bad news from this tiny, accursed corner of the world—whether they know it as Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, or the occupied territories—it can be a shock to learn that much of anything is thriving here, wild or otherwise. But hyenas and four kinds of gazelle haunt the parched wadis of the Judean Mountains, and ibex still gambol in the Gilead Mountains of Jordan. And for a few months in the spring and fall, the valley between the two ranges—the cosmic trench drained by the River Jordan—becomes one of the birdiest places on earth. To date, Backleh's employer, the four-year-old Palestine Wildlife Society, has set up only one ringing station on the West Bank—this one on the outskirts of the ancient city of Jericho, 850 feet below sea level and a few miles from the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth. But the operation is part of something larger and more ambitious, if not utterly improbable: an international migratory-bird project that links conservationists, researchers, students, and birdwatchers in Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. It's one of a very few regional programs and perhaps the only one in the environmental arena aimed at bringing Jews and Arabs together to work for a common goal.

By 8:30 a.m., the temperature has risen to about 90 degrees and the Dead Sea has disappeared behind a scrim of bluish haze, so the team decides to knock off for the day. In the last batch of captives, however, there's one specimen that Backleh singles out for special attention. To my eye, it's just another little brown bird—maybe a wren?

Backleh resists the urge to laugh. "A wren is an insectivore," he says, cupping the bird in his hands. "So, a completely different beak. This one, you see, has a powerful beak for crushing seeds. It is a sparrow—the Dead Sea sparrow. In Latin, Passer moabiticus."

I give the bird a second look. It's tiny—just 13 grams, according to the scale, less than half an ounce—but subtly colored, with delicate gray cheeks and crown, a black throat, and a white-and-yellow streak above its eye. "In its plumage it is beautiful, no?" asks Backleh. "Also in its characteristic calls." He whistles, inexpertly trying to mimic the bird's song, then stops and grins.

Letters and e-mails from abroad reporting the capture of a Wildlife Palestine bird still generate a fair amount of excitement. In 2001, a distance record was set when a tagged reed warbler was retrapped in Poland. But perhaps the most significant message from a foreign land came on February 17, 2003, when a Passer moabiticus from Jericho was netted 50 miles up the Jordan Valley in the small Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Ruppin. It was a symbolic thing—a sort of dove-of-peace moment—and also a tangible reminder that from an ecological standpoint the two places are really one. But to the Palestinian birders, it was something more: a sign that their homeland, though not yet sovereign, was beginning to take its place among the nations of the world.

Backleh brings the sparrow up to eye level, studying it closely. "It is the smallest of the sparrows but, I think, the most beautiful," he says. "I love the Dead Sea sparrow very much."

He smiles and makes a quick upward motion of the hands, and the bird is gone.

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Contributing editor Rob Buchanan wrote about Antarctica in November 2001.

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