EGYPTIAN TALES (1) Hoopoe Hoop-la

We were lucky enough earlier on this year to be able to have a holiday in Egypt and one of the optional excursions we signed up for was a couple of hours birdwatching around the Nile near to Aswan.

Now, over the last couple of years the beloved and I have become very fond of watching the birds, albeit in an understated and uninformed kind of a way, and we’ve taken to encouraging the various Finches, Nuthatches, Tits, Robins and suchlike to venture into our little postage stamp of a garden so we can watch them feed and be generally diverted by their busy little lives, but we hardly consider ourselves to be experts or anything approaching that. One or two of the little brown birds seem to have become very adept at keeping their mysterious identities to themselves, and the many, many Jackdaws have become something of an all-consuming – if fascinating to witness – pain when it comes to topping up the feeders. Woodpeckers occasionally show up, and once (and only once) I saw a Sparrowhawk perched upon a nearby fence for a couple of minutes before it went on its way.

So the prospect of seeing some birds we were unlikely to ever see at home was pretty much irresistible, and we gathered up our travel binoculars and our cameras and set forth on our excursion, fully expecting that we’d come back disappointed as sometimes tends to be the case with these sorts of trips. The previous year we’d chugged up a Loch to see “Seal Island” and there wasn’t a seal to be seen. This trip, however, was excellent. The local guide was very knowledgeable about the local bird life and seemed to know where pretty much every nest in the area was positioned so we saw a whole range of birds, from Bee-eaters to Cormorants, from Gannets to Grebes, from huge Osprey right down to the tiniest lovable little black and white Kingfishers and loads of others whose names I now have to look up, including a large "green" wader with massive almost comic red legs and feet which I took loads of very blurry pictures of, which I eventually started to believe I probably imagined due to the heat and dehydration, but which was almost certainly an African Purple Gallinule, an name which goes a long way towards explaining why I thought it was green I suppose.

Anyway, it was a good little trip. Well worth it if you ever get the chance.

At one point, though, as we floated peacefully along through the Papyrus reeds, I spotted a shape out of the corner of my eye; a tiny silhouette that slightly resembled the head of a pickaxe. I leaned across to the beloved and pointed, asking “What do you think that is…?”

Almost at the same moment our guide leapt across the boat in sudden excitement. “A Hoopoe!” he cried “Over there! A Hoopoe!” and just for a brief moment, there it was, and, before I could bring my camera to bear, it was gone. Much discussion followed about this elusive little bird and how spectacular it was when it crested, but sadly it made no other appearance, and we drifted on through the rest of the trip. Cameras clicked. Binoculars scanned and it was generally agreed that “a good time was had by all” as they say.

But now I had a mission. We had another week to spend in Egypt. I was determined to get a picture of a Hoopoe somehow. Every little trip or excursion thereafter would find me scanning the rocks and stones, hoping against hope for a glimpse of that distinctive head popping up to have a look at the funny tourists below, but I was always disappointed. It became something of a small running joke between the little gang of travellers we had hooked up with. Where was I off to? Off looking for another Hoopoe I expect.

And so it continued through temple after temple. In one temple someone from the group spotted one, I was told, right at the top of a particularly large pillar, but by the time I’d navigated myself around all the spectacular architecture it had gone. If it had ever been there at all. I was beginning to suspect that some gentle mockery was afoot. Another time, we were talking to a couple who’d just come back from a walk and they were describing this lovely little bird they’d just seen. They weren’t sure what it was, but it had this funny shaped head…

By this stage “Hoopoe” was rapidly becoming something of a term of mockery and derision in the cabins and hotel rooms temporarily serving in lieu of MAWH Towers for the duration. In fact, by the end of the week I was starting to doubt that I’d ever seen one at all, and whether they actually existed, when a carving of one was pointed out to me on one of the temple walls. I wasn’t exactly sure at first, but yes, there it was, that distinctive shaped head, drawn into the rock by a similar obsessive thousands of years ago.

By the final morning I had all but given up on ever seeing a live version of this elusive creature. We had a 6AM start for our last excursion of the trip, before heading off to the airport later that morning. As we clambered into the motorboat that morning, I got the impression that by now, even our tour guide, the rather splendid Mahmoud, was in on the joke. There were a lot of birds nesting on the rocks alongside the Aswan Dam, and I half heartedly and dutifully shot off a few photographs, but I really wasn’t up for the chase any more and I concentrated on enjoying being on the water that morning and trying to absorb the memories to look back on later on that week when I was back at my desk.

The Temple of Kalabsha was the final visit of our long strip, and a very impressive place it is too. It was very early in the day and the birdsong was almost drowning out the historical facts that Mahmoud was trying to tell us. In amongst all the birdsong was a delicate, lyrical little sound that went “hoo… po… hoo… po… hoo… po…”

Could it be…? Surely they’re not named after the sound they make…?

I looked up, and there at the top one of the temples, a distinctive little head was sticking up, and for once I had the right lens on and the camera switched on and was able to take the snap you see at the top of this page. Ten minutes later we were back in the boat and heading homewards, so he really couldn’t have appeared any later on in our particular holiday, but sometimes the time is just right to make a very special moment into a very special memory, and just for once I really did believe that “everything comes to those who wait”.