Pelicans over Beirut

I’m on the balcony, making pictures of the clouds. I can never get enough of clouds. Or horizons.
Hubbie joins me and says “Nice birds, eh?”
Birds? I see no birds.
“There, those pelicans up ahead,” and he points to something in the sky.

Pelicans? He must be losing it, I think.

“Those are no pelicans,” I say, when I finally spot them too. “Those are storks. Storks migrate. Who has ever heard of pelicans in Beirut?”
“I tell you, those are pelicans.”
He gets out the binoculars, and sure enough, there’s this flock of pelicans circling right above Beirut. We have huge swarms (or flock, I should say) of storks every spring. They soar around on the air current.
But I’d never seen pelicans. White pelicans, to be exact.

The Middle East, located at the juncture of three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, makes it a region second to none in the world for tracking, research and study of the phenomenon of bird migration. The Middle East is a “bottle neck” for the migration from Europe and to Africa and back. More than 500 million birds pass over the Middle East twice a year in the autumn and spring migration. Source

And apparently the white pelican is quite a common traveler, although it’s the first time in 18 years I’ve seen them in Lebanon. You learn something every day.

They migrate from somewhere in Europe or Asia, to Africa, along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Beirut is sort of jutting out into the sea, and so if you go in a straight line, you end up right above my neighborhood. You can see that in this shot I took this afternoon while coming down from the mountains. The sea goes around Beirut.

And another one of the Corniche this afternoon at 4:45 P.M. Can never get enough op that one.