About Me

I am a birdwatcher and a bird guide from Kuwait. I regularly publish my sightings from Kuwait and abroad. I also publish my personal birding trip reports, and trip reports for the tours I guide.

My passion for birds stretches back to my childhood when the norm for bird-lovers was to catch them and have them in the palms of our hands or keep them alive in cages. However, sometimes they got sick so we felt sorry for and released them. Unfortunately, most of the released birds cannot fly and soon die, they seldom survived. It was also not against the norm to eat birds. Sadly, hunting was so popular in the old days. I personally never hunted birds or held a gun, however, catching birds stopped when I became 15 years old.

I started bird watching when I was 40 years old, in the autumn of 2001. At the time, I had a film camera and photographed birds with a Sigma 300mm lens. By sunset, I developed my photographs, scanned them into digital form, then published them at night on my website alsirhan.com. Back in 2001, photographs of birds were scarce on the internet, so having published those pictures back then felt like a great achievement.

This website has been online since 2008. I used to blog my sightings with the photographs on my previous website, alsirhan.com, using plain HTML, but then I met a European bird watcher who suggested I use the WordPress platform, an open source-based platform for blogging. It has an editor that makes blogging easier and more manageable than the cumbersome HTML code.

Since 2011, this website contains the official Kuwait bird list, as endorsed by the Kuwait Ornithological Rarities Committee (KORC), of which I am the secretary. KORC was established in 2006 and, since then, it publishes and updates the list.

One of the aims of this website was to promote bird watching as a hobby in Kuwait and in the Arab world and encourage the conservation of birds and reduce bird hunting by showing the beauty of the birds in this website. However, after all these years, things have changed since then. There are now more bird photographers than hunters, and the hunting laws have become strict; thus, Kuwait and the Arab world have fewer hunters and more bird-lovers.

I am currently publishing a gallery of photographs of all the birds recorded in Kuwait, Kuwait Bird Gallery. I will keep adding photographs to the gallery as I photograph more birds and add the ones that have been sitting in my hard disk for years.

I have another website, alsirhan.com. This website is solely in the Arabic language and it is for Arabic-speaking people and contains all aspects of wildlife, birds, reptiles, rodents, and plants. I intend to make it a resource of information in the Arabic language covering all the wildlife in Kuwait.

To contact me, please use the contact form.

AbdulRahman Al-Sirhan Alenezi
Kuwait

Updated in November 2020

2 Responses

  1. A. M. Aman says:

    Hi,
    This a great effort, I am planning to develop a site about Kuwait, could I link to your site?
    Thanks

  2. Urs-Peter Stäuble says:

    Dear Elena

    Your observation of Amur Falcon in Cyprus was possible thanks to interventions of
    the BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme,
    BirdLife factsheet:’ ….the species’s grassland habitats and persecution on migration is a further threat (Symes and Woodborne 2010). In Nagaland, India, the species was heavily persecuted during autumn migration however following an international response and effective conservation action, no birds were captured during the 2013 autumn migration (Lawrence 2013). ‘

    Conservation is the key to observation
    Best wishes

    Urs-Peter Stäuble

    Von: Elena Markitani [mailto:elena.markitani@birdlifecyprus.org.cy]
    Gesendet: Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2016 16:16
    An: ‘Elena Markitani’
    Betreff: BirdLife Cyprus – Monthly Checklist for May 2016

    Dear friends,

    Please find attached the Monthly Checklist for May 2016.

    Kind Regards,

    Elena

    Έλενα Μαρκιτανή
    Λειτουργός Ανάπτυξης
    Πτηνολογικός Σύνδεσμος Κύπρου
    Τ.Θ. 12026
    Λευκωσία, 2340, Κύπρος Elena Markitani
    Development Officer
    BirdLife Cyprus
    PO Box 12026
    Nicosia, 2340,
    Cyprus

    Tel: +357 22 455072 Fax: +357 22 455073
    Email: elena.markitani@birdlifecyprus.org.cy
    Website: http://www.birdlifecyprus.org

    Working to conserve our birds, our environment, our future…

    Εγγραφείτε στο μηνιαίο ηλεκτρονικό μας δελτίο «Φτερωτά e-νέα» δωρεάν κάνοντας κλικ εδώ!
    Subscribe for free to our monthly e-newsletter “In-Flight e-news” by clicking here!

    Help us spread the word.

    Ο Πτηνολογικός Σύνδεσμος είναι εθνικός εταίρος του BirdLife International.
    BirdLife Cyprus is the national partner of BirdLife International.

    Please consider the environment before printing this email

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