The Migration

Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming. Jer. 8: 7

Every spring, half a billion birds migrate through Israel and the West Bank from their wintering grounds in Africa to their breeding grounds in Europe, and every autumn they return the same way. It’s one of the busiest corridors for bird migration in the world – only the Isthmus of Panama, which links North and South America, has heavier traffic, and Panama’s airspace doesn’t support the same density of military aircraft as Israel’s. The large soaring birds that migrate by day, to exploit the thermals rising from the land, pose a particular threat to aviation: most of Europe’s white storks and white pelicans traverse the skies above Israel and Palestine twice a year and, inevitably, collisions ensue. The effects of a ten-kilo bird hitting a plane travelling at 1,000 kilometres per hour with the force of one hundred tonnes are potentially catastrophic and, in the last forty years, the Israeli Air Force has lost more aircraft to ‘bird strike’ than it has to enemy action. Not surprisingly, it has therefore begun to take an active interest in the migration, and with the help of an academic and birdwatcher named Yossi Leshem, it has built a radar system designed to detect the passage of flocks through what it calls the ‘bird plague zones’ above Israel’s narrow waist.

When I arrived in Israel earlier this year, I wanted to witness the spring migration and the military’s attempts to monitor it, and I decided to go birdwatching with a Palestinian friend of mine. I met Sami Backleh on the second day of my trip, outside my hotel on the edge of Palestinian East Jerusalem. Sami became a birdwatcher by accident. He was working in the microbiology department at Birzeit University near Ramallah in September 2000, at the beginning of the second intifada. At the time, he knew nothing about birds, but he was interested in nature. One day a colleague mentioned that his son was working with an organization called the Palestine Wildlife Society (PWLS), which had set up a bird-ringing station in Jericho. When Sami went to visit it, he was intrigued by what he saw.

He must have made a good impression on the staff of the PWLS, for they kept ‘nagging’ him to join them. It wasn’t a ‘safe position’ – he wasn’t even sure that he’d be paid – but he decided to risk it, so at the height of the intifada, when Palestinian society was barely functioning, Sami began a new career as a birder. He treated it as ‘an adventure’, which became even more challenging when his colleague’s son left after a month, leaving him to manage on his own. When Imad Atrash, the executive director of the PWLS, asked him to conduct a survey, he knew only two birds – the sparrow and the pigeon – and he was forced to teach himself by spending hours in the field with a book, identifying the different species.

In 2005, he came to England to take a degree in conservation biology. Nowadays, he is trying to raise funds for a project researching the impact of Israel’s ‘separation barrier’ on the ecology of the West Bank. When work began on the barrier in June 2002, the government of Israel said it was designed to protect citizens from terrorist attack but, like most Palestinians, Sami rejects the idea that it’s a security measure. He believes that the barrier is being used to appropriate land and natural resources.

Initially, the barrier was supposed to follow the route of the ‘Green Line’, agreed in the 1949 Armistice at the end of the war between the newly created state of Israel and its Arab neighbours, but it frequently deviates inside the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, effectively annexing parts of it. For most of its length, it consists of a fence, flanked by trenches, dirt paths and barbed-wire barriers, but in some areas it’s a concrete wall, six to eight metres high. As well as dividing Palestinian farmers from their land, and imposing additional restrictions on the movement of the population, it’s often said that the barrier is affecting animal migration and plant propagation. So far, approximately sixty per cent of the barrier has been built, and Sami is proposing to conduct a study of biodiversity in four sites in the same ecosystem, two on either side of the wall in the north, and two on either side of its proposed route in the south. It’s a dangerous scheme: ‘Imagine if you are beside a settlement, or beside the wall, doing animal trapping at night. You can easily be shot, and nobody will know. They will claim that you were a terrorist – that you were trying to climb the wall or something. So it’s not easy. It’s taking me a lot of time to select the site.’

We agreed to go birdwatching in the Wadi Qelt, near Jericho, ten days later, but as so often happens in the Middle East, events forced us to change our plans. At the end of the week, Israel launched an assault on Gaza intended to stop Palestinian militants firing rockets at Israeli towns in the south of the country. ‘Operation Warm Winter’, as the Israeli Defense Forces chose to call it, began with air strikes on ‘terrorist infrastructure’, but after two days, the army invaded northern Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian National Authority, announced that he was breaking off relations with Israel in protest. When I set off for Hebron on Sunday, March 1 there were strikes and demonstrations across the West Bank. The next day, a twelve-year-old boy was killed in the village of Beit Awwa. By Wednesday, approximately 120 people had died in Gaza, many of them civilians, and at eight p.m. on Thursday, a van driver from East Jerusalem called Alaa Abu Dhein walked into the Mercaz HaRav seminary, the ideological birthplace of the Israeli settler movement, and shot eight students.

On Friday, March 6 Ehud Barak, the Minister of Defense, imposed further restrictions on travel in the West Bank, and Sami rang and cancelled our trip to the Wadi Qelt. As well as the difficulty of getting there, he was unwilling to run the risk of meeting settlers intent on exacting revenge for the terrible crime committed in an institution to which many of them look for guidance. I thought he was being overly cautious on my behalf until I heard that Imad Atrash, Sami’s former boss, had also cancelled two field trips planned for the weekend. If I wanted to witness the spring migration in the skies above the West Bank, I would have to hire an Israeli guide.

We left Jerusalem at seven in the morning in a beaten-up four- wheel drive with 350,000 kilometres on the clock and no passenger seat in the front. I was sitting in the back behind my guide and driver for the day. Eran Banker was, like Sami Backleh, a biologist and birdwatcher. He was born in Israel, but had spent most of his childhood in South Africa. As a result, he saw himself as being at one remove from his compatriots, and yet he enjoyed the luxury that all Israelis share at home – relatively unimpeded travel.

Our first stop was the settlement of Kfar Adumim – the smaller neighbour of the fortified hilltop town of Ma’ale Adumim, which stretches deep into the West Bank. Eran said Kfar Adumim was a relaxed place, home to a ‘heterogeneous population’ of religious and non-religious Jews, and the guard on the gate waved us through with a cursory glance. In the past, I’d always stopped at checkpoints and bypassed settlements on my way from one Palestinian town and city to another. Now I was bypassing checkpoints, and stopping at the settlements, and so far I’d seen no evidence of the other inhabitants of the land, apart from the Bedouin encampments at the side of the road.

At eight a.m. we drove through the winding streets of Kfar Adumim until we came to an unfenced corner, facing east. The hilltop locations that the settlers colonize, for reasons of security, also provide excellent vantage points for birdwatching, and we were looking down on a series of interlocking valleys, which ran from north to south along the fringe of the Judaean Desert. It was March 10 and the hillsides were dusted with a thin green layer of vegetation. Soon the sun would burn it off, but while it lasted, it would provide vital fodder for the Bedouin flocks of sheep and goats, and fuel for migrating birds.

Eran set up the telescope in front of a bench decorated with a metal plaque. Swifts were circling in the valley below. They arrive in Israel and the West Bank in January or February and nest in cracks between the stones in the upper half of the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem’s Old City. I’d watched the dark flickering shapes wheeling above the bobbing heads of the assembled faithful at five o’clock one Friday afternoon, at the beginning of the Sabbath, and their movements had seemed as fluent and irresistible as the thoughts and longings that inspired the prayers written on pieces of paper and crammed into the cracks in the lower half of the wall.

We spotted a dark glossy bird, with red bands on its wings, called a Tristram’s grackle, an iridescent, blue-black bird called the Palestine sunbird and a great grey shrike, or ‘butcher bird’, which kills lizards, mice and smaller birds, pinning the corpses to thorn bushes. Suddenly, the roar of engines shattered the early morning peace and a plane appeared from behind the houses of the settlement. It was a Hercules transport plane and its fuselage was painted the same dun green and brown as the landscape. It was flying so low that its bulbous belly seemed to brush the hills on the far side of the valley and its flight path and altitude told Eran one thing: the air force had received no reports of storks or cranes so far today.

Security precautions were more apparent at the next settlement. The guard on the gate at Mitzpe Jericho, which stands on one of the most easterly outcrops of the Judaean Hills, said that they had ‘intelligence’ of an impending attack in a stolen car or ambulance, though a brief conversation with Eran, in Hebrew, was enough to convince him that we were not terrorists in disguise. The settlement was enclosed within a high metal fence, and yet it was still expanding – as we left the last house behind and drove along a narrow ridge, we passed a group of caravans set up on a patch of scrubby land to the right. A young soldier was sitting on a deckchair in the shade of an army watchtower, a rifle slung across her lap.

The road ended at a fenced-in patch of semi-gravelled land with a black water tower. It was a place Eran knew well. Yossi Leshem’s network of radar stations is not infallible (as Eran put it, Israel is so small that if someone burps in the north, you’ll hear it on the border with Egypt) and sometimes southbound birds are over the centre of the country before the radar can pick them up. During the migration, human observers are required to augment the electronic surveillance and last autumn Eran spent ten hours a day, for two months, sitting on a chair by the edge of the cliff, counting the passage of raptors, cranes and storks.

The migration isn’t the only attraction that draws birders to Israel – the country is approximately one-tenth of the size of the UK, and yet because of its location at the junction of three continents, it’s home to a higher number of resident species. What’s more, any bird that migrates even short distances in Africa, Europe or Asia can end up there by mistake. ‘That’s the magic that draws birders here – the great potential for surprises,’ said Eran, as we stood by the fence sealing the sheer drop to the valley below. He pointed out a yellow-vented bulbul – one of the most common birds in Israel – and the rare long-billed pipit, and we heard a hoopoe calling for its mate.

We bypassed Jericho and headed north up the Jordan Valley, one of the northern reaches of the Syrian-African Rift which runs from Turkey to Mozambique. It’s a perfect avian flyway: its high sides and deep centre generate the thermals that are vital to soaring birds and its wetlands provide abundant food. We passed groves of date palms and fields of cabbages and on the right-hand side, beyond two parallel fences, the land fell away towards the Jordan river. The border was no more than a shell shot away, and a decommissioned tank dug in behind an earthen rampart, its barrel pointed eastwards, commemorated former battles.

At twelve o’clock, we swept through the checkpoint marking the northern limit of the West Bank and entered the Beit She’an Valley, in northern Israel. The area is full of fish farms and its flat floor has become a simulacrum of an estuary landscape. For twenty minutes, we drove between thickly stocked pools and watched shore birds – egrets, avocets, gulls and herons – stalking the fringes of the man-made mud flats. The shotgun cartridges littering the paths proved that this was yet another contested territory.

At half past twelve, Eran rang his contact in the Israeli Air Force. The news was mixed – 8,000 white storks had taken off from a field in north-west Israel an hour or so previously. They would be over Lebanon before we could catch them, but another flock of 2,000 birds had been sighted an hour to the south, near Be’er Sheva in the Negev Desert. We would have to wait to see which way they went.

Eran had left Israel when he was six, and he didn’t return until he was twenty. As a result, he had taken his degree when most of his contemporaries were serving in the army; he did his national service with people who were five or six years younger than him. Because of a series of injuries he’d picked up playing sport, he wasn’t considered for active service and he had spent three years teaching children in the West Bank about nature.

‘I want my storks!’ he said, when he rang for an update on the birds’ progress. The news was good – the flock had been sighted sixty kilometres south-west of Beit She’an, and Eran reckoned that the wind would push them eastwards as they travelled north. We set off in search of a vantage point to await their arrival.

There were mustard plants and leggy yellow flowers called bishop’s weed growing on the side of the road, and the hillsides were speckled with crown anemones and turban buttercups – bright red flowers which, to me, looked like poppies. Soon, the Haynes iris, for which Mount Gilboa is famous, would flower, turning the meadows purple. The wind was mottling the surface of the fish pools, and the haze was so thick that we could only just make out the outline of the Gilead mountains on the far side of the valley. Eran wasn’t confident that we’d be able to spot our flock. ‘Some days, you can watch thousands go past, and other days, you won’t see anything,’ he muttered as he set up our telescope by the side of the road. Earlier in the morning, he had defied a superstition by naming the bird he hoped to see, and Merops orientalis – the little green bee-eater – had rewarded him by failing to appear.

Fortunately, our white storks were less elusive. I don’t find it easy spotting birds, even when they’re pointed out to me. Often, the bird has gone before I’ve worked out where it is, but for once, I was looking in the right place. As I gazed at the crest of the hill to our right, a blizzard of dark dots appeared from behind it and swept towards us, moulding themselves to the slope stretching out into the plain. I checked my watch – it was ten past three – and when I looked up again, it took me a moment to relocate the birds. Already, they were in the middle of the valley, streaming out behind one another in a fluid formation, like a flattened speech balloon.

It was astonishing to think how far – and how fast – they had travelled. They had left southern Africa while I was still in England and, flying for an average of nine hours a day, at forty kilometres per hour, they had pushed through eastern Africa to their pre-wintering grounds in Sudan and Chad. From there, they turned north-west towards Egypt, following the Nile from Aswan to Qina, before crossing the Sinai peninsula and entering southern Israel. Only this morning, they had been in the vast expanse of the Negev Desert and now they were passing our station on the slopes of Mount Gilboa.

Eran lined up the telescope and stood back to let me use it. Its reach transformed the flock: it wasn’t a blur of black dots any more. I could see distinct shapes, trailing long, collapsible legs. Their colour had changed as well. They were no longer black; they were white, with black stains on their wings. They caught a thermal rising from the slopes of the mountain and began to wheel and climb. At least 2,000, maybe more, Eran announced, adding with a touch of pride that he was a conservative counter; others would have put the number as high as 2,500.

Most of the hundreds of thousands of white storks that pass through the Beit She’an Valley stop to drink, but these birds wouldn’t: with the wind driving them on, they would keep going until dark. They would roost in trees or on a cliff face, and feed on anything they could find – dead frogs, fish and insects. Sometimes, Eran said, they arrive in Israel with blackened legs and bodies, having scavenged through burnt undergrowth to feed on corpses barbecued in bush fires. By tomorrow, they would be over Lebanon and Syria, where they would turn north-west, cutting the corner of the Mediterranean and flying above the Turkish port of Iskenderum. They would cross the Bosporus at Istanbul, or the west side of the Sea of Marmara, and in Bulgaria, they would reach a turning point: some flocks would keep going into Central and Southern Europe and others would turn east, towards nesting grounds in western Russia.

I looked up again, wanting to place them in the broader context of the valley, but I couldn’t find them. This time, Eran had lost them too. He was scanning the horizon with binoculars, but already the birds had disappeared.