Hot Spots for Bird Watchers

I started my new job at the headquarters of BirdLife International in Cambridge,

UK, two and a half years ago, my enthusiasm for the new project facing

me was mingled with more than a little trepidation. Lying before me, on

my desk, was a bright orange and rather dauntingly thick paperback book,

Important Bird Areas in Europe, whose 888 pages described 2,444 of the

most important sites for birds in 32 European countries. The publication

of the book had helped to focus the efforts of bird conservation groups

throughout Europe and had been widely cited as a successful marriage between

science and management in wildlife conservation.

My own task was to co-ordinate the completion of a similar kind of book

for the Middle East, as part of BirdLife International’s longer term aim

to identify all of the important bird areas in the world before the end

of the millennium. Important Bird Areas of the Middle East had been on

the drawing board as a project proposal for a number of years, and had

finally secured funding from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds,

the BirdLife International partner in the UK, after money had been donated

by its members and by the general public following the emergency created

by the Gulf War oil pollution.

Any wildlife conservation action today usually has as its ultimate aim

one of three different targets, all of them being necessary and complementary:

the conservation of species, sites, and ecosystems. The IBA book is designed

as an aid to the second approach, site conservation. For many countries

in the Middle East, a large amount of information has accumulated regarding

which birds occur at which sites, but this is distributed within many different

books, journals, note-books and other even more arcane sources, often unpublished

or only available with difficulty. The aim of the IBA project was to sort

through this huge and unmanageable mass of information, so as to come up

with a clear and up to date picture of the priorities for site conservation

in the Middle East, to provide guidance to all people and agencies planning

to take actions to conserve birds and other wildlife in the region. The

project aimed to answer questions such as: which are the most important

sites, why are they important, where are they, which ones are safe for

the moment and which are immediately threatened, and so on.

But how does one choose which are the most “important” sites

for birds, or decide that a site is “not important”, in a way

that can be accepted by all parties? This is partly a question of scale,

and BirdLife International decided that its role was to identify and list

only those sites which were important on a regional (Middle Eastern) or

global level, excluding those sites which were important at a local or

national level.

After consultations in the region, sites were considered “important”

if they supported species threatened with global extinction (Red Data Book

species) or with extinction in the Middle East, or if they supported particularly

large numbers of a species (usually waterfowl or seabirds, since these

show the greatest tendency to congregate at sites), or if they supported

particularly good numbers of Middle Eastern `endemic’ birds, i.e. those

species whose world populations are restricted to the Middle East and for

which the Middle Eastern countries therefore have most responsibility for

preserving, in any contribution to maintaining global biodiversity.

(54k JPEG)

International wanted this to be more than a mere desk study – by putting

responsibility for the data collection into the hands of conservationists

living and working in-country, wherever possible, it was intended that

these people, at the sharp end of conservation action in the region, would

be more likely to feel that the book was `theirs’ and to actually use it

in taking action to conserve the most vulnerable sites in the region. In

the event, more than 65 people in the Middle East contributed details on

391 Important Bird Areas, ranging from staff of wildlife reserves to government

scientists, and from amateur bird watchers to hunters concerned about declining

bird numbers. Birds do not respect national frontiers, and their successful

conservation demands that such major demonstrations of regional cooperation

be made.

The variety of sites in the inventory was eye-opening, even to someone

who has worked and travelled in the Middle East. It is perhaps invidious

to single out any for special mention, since they are all equally important

in their own ways. However, some of them stick particularly in my memory,

even though I haven’t visited them. The ice-age refuge of Shallal ad-Dahna,

high in the Asir mountains of Saudi Arabia, with its juniper woodland,

permanent streams and relict populations of northern, temperate zone animals

such as the magpie. Or the rocky, monsoon lashed coast of southern Oman

with its unique cold water up welling offshore, which supports kelp beds,

abalones and possibly even breeding humpback whales – sounding more like

northern California than Arabia.