Tétouan and Marrakesh

I mentioned cattle egrets when I showed you the glossy ibises we saw in Casablanca, and they are one of the most ubiquitous birds I’ve seen on this trip. In Meknes, when I went up to the rooftop to count birds in the morning and would see maybe a couple dozen storks flying over, I would also see at least five times that many cattle egrets. It was in Tétouan, however, when I got close enough for a decent picture. Here’s one perched on a wall behind the big fish market, …

and here’s a tree overflowing with them just down the hill a bit from that wall. I didn’t see any signs of nesting there and doubt there would be. Instead, they seem to like each other’s company, and that was a convenient location near the fish market from which they probably can get some tasty scraps.

We’re in Marrakesh now, and we did come by train, but we didn’t take the Express, so we had a nice leisurely ride watching the countryside turn from “hot-summer Mediterranean“, with rolling hills covered in olive trees with fields ready for haying, to “hot desert,” with not much growing at all, and it hit 105°F for our camel ride yesterday afternoon. There are still plenty of birds around, despite the climate, and here’s my latest attempt at getting a house bunting portrait from the rooftop of our new riad.

Finally, the common bulbuls have gone from “quite infrequent” in the north, to “pretty common” around here, and this is a pair posing the way I often get to see bulbuls do.