Birding Lake Quarun

We try to go birding most places we go now to see new birds and keep developing our birding skills. On our big trip last year we had some amazingly skilled guides and we learned a lot from them and saw some amazing wildlife experiences.

It was a bit more difficult finding a guide in Egypt but we eventually found Ahmed online and he had good references. We started out at 3.40am from Cairo and were birding by 6am. We saw some great birds and 68 species of which 9 were lifers. We also had brief sighting of an Egyptian Wolf (a kind of Jackel). Our guide certainly knew where to look.

However, our guide’s ID skills were lacking with whole families he didn’t even try to identify (gulls and hirundines). He also got several IDs wrong and we had to correct when recording our sightings which left us doubting about the others he made. But since I mostly had photos we could confirm them. The guide would largely ignore Helen too which is something we have noticed in Islamic countries before. But the most negative thing from the day was that $50 USD went missing from our bag during the day and it had to be the driver. It left a bad taste after an otherwise good day but we move on - if you travel enough you experience this kind of thing and have to assume they needed it more than you and/or are the poorer for it rather than you.Read more