DAY 5 – MAR 12TH. MERJA ZERGA LAGOON BOAT RIDE AND SEVERAL PLACES ALONG THE SHORELINE.
Highlights: MARSH OWL steals the show during another fantastic birding day!!
At 7am we assembled on the terrace where we spent a short while watching the local bird species and then we walked to the sea front to look for Lesser Crested Tern. The sky was clear and bright, there was no wind, it was quite warm but we never saw the tern!
Looking out to sea we saw many Sandwich Terns, a distant Great Skua and on a sandbar we saw Audouin’s Gull.
After breakfast, which was consumed on the hotel terrace, we walked down to the quay and met our boatman Khalill, he was going to give us a tour of the lagoon and also take us to look for Marsh Owl. The boat trip was a delight, the lagoon was like a mill pond and we started adding new birds for the trip: Great Crested Grebe & Bar-tailed Godwit were seen very early on.
At one stage we got off the boat to walk on the marsh and it was then that we saw a Marsh Owl in flight, not once but twice, what a fantastic looking bird. We were very lucky as this rare bird is usually a night flyer but a flock of sheep were being driven across the marsh and they disturbed the owl from its daytime roost, what luck, and what a great bird.
We then spent a couple of hours on the boat exploring the lagoon during which time we had good views of lots more species: we added Whiskered & Common Tern, Common Shelduck and Black-winged Kite to our list but we also watched Caspian Tern, Osprey, Oystercatcher, Avocet, Eurasian Spoonbill, Greater Flamingo and many waders.
After the boat trip we returned to the hotel for lunch, but soon we were out birding again. We drove a couple of kilometers out of Moulay Bousselham and walked into some open grass- meadows on the edge of the lagoon. What a treat, the fields had shallow seasonal pools and they were full of birds. We found huge numbers of Black-tailed Godwits and also: Garganey, Golden Plover, Lapwing, Yellow Wagtails, Water Pipit, Meadow Pipit, Common Snipe, Ruff, Redshank, Greenshank, Eurasian Curlew, Whimbrel, Cattle & Little Egret, Purple Heron and our first Squacco Heron.
Another stop on the edge of the marsh allowed us to get even closer to the lagoon shoreline where we found our first Little Stints with hundreds more Black-tailed Godwits, Redshank, Dunlin, Curlew Sandpiper, Ruff, Grey Plover, Sanderling, Kentish & Ringed Plover, Black-winged Stilts and lots of Glossy Ibis.
It was now late in the afternoon so we called it a day and returned to the hotel terrace where we enjoyed a couple of hours watching over the lagoon from our high vantage point. Later we ate a chicken tajine at a local restaurant which finished off the day nicely.
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