January 20 2020. Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve (DDCR). Our day started in spine tingling fashion with the pre-dawn calls of an Eagle Owl coming from a high dune beside our campsite. Its call, a deep, hollow, far-carrying hooo at 10-second intervals, was responded to by a female, higher pitched and slightly hoarse, on the other side of our settlement. But that was before light, before breakfast and before we got our tasks for the day.
It hardly needs saying that working is a desert can be quite taxing. I’d never experienced it before, it is everything you might imagine: slogging up a dune face, sand carried on the wind and the radiant heat of the sun making wide brim hats and long-sleeves essential cover-ups (even though it’s only January).
As we paused for lunch, I spotted a couple of large birds airborne and far from us and above the horizon. They drifted rather than flew and had the profile of large planks, wings slightly downward tilted from the horizontal. Lappet-faced Vultures! I called out with fingers crossed, although that was just about all they could be based on the species list we had received; and they were! They came closer, drifting in large circles until one passed almost overhead. Unmistakably vultures with heavy flesh-tearing beaks, wrinkled bare heads and wings made for effortless soaring. They circled the valley to our left where the white skeletal remains of Oryx dotted the sand floor. There is no mammal top predator left in the Arabian Desert to cull and devour the weak and infirm, Lions and Leopards are long gone so, I suppose Oryx and gazelles must just fade away. Wherever possible, their carcasses are transported to the nearby valley in an effort to attract the vultures; apparently it works.
