Tuesday 14th - Oued Jenna

Tuesday 14^th

We woke up and packed up ready to load the car for our drive to Oued Jenna. We were collected at 8.00 for breakfast in a café of a bowl of semolina, bread and cheese with small pots of honey, peanut butter or olive oil and tea.

We drove north along the coast and round the head of the lagoon to the Hotel Attitude, which was home to a White-throated Bee eater. At the entrance, we were given visitor badges and we walked along the track taking note of the hundreds of Vagrant Emperors that were flying and perching around the bushes, despite the strong wind. We spent nearly an hour walking round the hotel complex checking out the migrants and local birds before Nigel found the Bee-eater near the entrance. After a slight overshoot, I was soon looking at this second for the Western Palearctic. 

The White-throated Bee-eater flew over the roof and disappeared so we continued our drive to Gleb Jdiane, which is a pumping tower with constant, gently running water. There were several butterflies, a Great Grey Shrike, Tree Pipit, Red-veined Darter and a Bee-eater flew over.
We drove on to Gleb Jdiane were we walked around the water tank and pool. There was a Southern Grey Shrike on a bush and several butterflies fluttering around the plants, including Long-tailed Blue and an orange butterfly.

We took a short diversion to an area with some 3,000 year old rock art. As we crested the hill a pair of Desert Larks flew off. We spent a bit of time looking at the, mainly scratched, rock art on the boulders at the top of this hill.

The road is very straight and some of the rock formations are interesting. See our return journey to see why this one is known as The Sphynx.

We carried on to Km 112 for lunch where we drove out to an area of Acacia Trees. The car was parked in some shade and we spent a bit of time searching through the trees for Desert Sparrow, Fulvous Babbler and our first Cricket Longtails as well as a Dumeril's Fringe-fingered Lizard.

We made a few stops along the road for more Desert Sparrows and a Lanner Falcon, before reaching Oued Jenna, which is a narrow 30KM stretch of Acacia. We drove up the Oued for a km to our camp site. Around the acacias we found more Fulvous Babblers, Desert Sparrows, Cricket Longtail and a Woodchat Shrike.

While waiting for dinner to be prepared we walked around the desert area where we found a Cream Coloured Courser foraging on a bank, then we found Hoopoe and Bar-tailed Lark. In the near distance there were a couple of Camels and as we scanned around a dark falcon flew across which was identified as a Lanner.

We walked back to camp for a camel stew dinner. We followed this up by walking round the sandy areas with a torch finding an interesting black and white beetle and a Tarabul's Gerbil.

We managed to persuaded Mohammed to take us for a night drive, listening for Golden Nightjars but no luck. Across the desert, we found a jerboa which turned out to be a Lesser Egyptian Jerboa. Just after we reached the road we noticed something on the side of the road that looked like road kill but turned out to be a Desert Hedgehog snacking on a dead Jerboa. As we got out the hedgehog disappeared across the road rapidly but squeaky noises in a bush by the road led us to another one hiding which we managed to get really good views of. We drove across the desert area on the other side of the road seeing more Jerboa and then we had an interesting eye-shine. We drove towards them but the animal moved, we managed to follow it for a while identifying it as a Wild Cat.  Mohammed dropped us off and we walked 1 km walk back to camp but heard and saw nothing else. So we settled down to sleep in our, surprisingly comfortable, one-man flip-up tents.
Click here for a map of our route.