Arabia, spring 2022
Seemingly just as I had accustomed myself to the sweet kiss of a winter North Sea flushing through my neoprene, the time had arrived to return to the Middle East. We were greeted with quite a chilly start to the visit, and it was well into April before the sweet kiss of a refreshing midday fizzer was required.
As with my last few overseas ‘reports,’ I’ll be keeping the actual reporting to a minimum, so here’s a few shots from earlier on in the season.
The winter rains had made the area a lot greener than when we left it and this, coupled with the slightly cooler weather, gave the landscape a more welcoming, almost ‘euro-herping’ sort of feel at times. Herp-wise, we were off the mark fairly quickly with the nice chameleon pictured above, and by the start of April our first snakes began to turn up.
A few more shots from free-time explorations:
Other than the amazing wildlife to be encountered in this part of the world (for the time being anyway), there’s also some very high-end fashion for the catwalk connoisseur with an eye for a bargain, as evidenced next.
Time for some more herps. Racers in fact, a couple of absolutely stunning racers. The first likely being a Sahara racer (Platyceps saharicus), although it’s range and differentiation from P.rhodorachis is still up for debate. We found this little treat by the side of the road shortly after sunset.
Racer number two is arguably the holy grail for this area: the amazingly beautiful Elegant racer (Platyceps elegantissimus). I did not expect to ever see this snake, so I was over the moon when our evening wadi-herping team managed to snaffle it.
And here’s a racer montage, mainly because they're two of the finest snakes I've had the pleasure to work with, plus a couple of other things thrown in.
As alluded to in one of the captions above, we also snaffled a (hornless) horned viper (Cerastes gasperetti). This was in addition to a few Painted carpet vipers (Echis coloratus).
And a few final shots from the end of the visit:
Finally, a brief aquatic section with some nice findings. Mainly manta rays. I was particularly happy to see them! I’ll post a video at the end of this too.
And that just about concludes proceedings. Thanks for reading.