9 
We should also like to focus attention on the sites which need further 
coverage; the obvious contenders are shown on the map. Visits need not be 
major expeditions: they could be a spring visit to Istanbul, a week, 
touring the deserts of the north Red sea, a few days on an Intourist trip 
to Tbilisi in the central Caucasus, a few hours sailing through the 
straits of Hormuz; but if the data are collected in a systematic fashion, 
they are all valuable. We also suggest that anyone planning a detailed 
raptor count should ensure that the data are collected in such a way as to 
allow the figures to be compared with other sites and with future counts. 
To this end, we have drawn up a list of suggested guidelines based on our 
experiences in Djibouti. 
This brief article is largely a result of discussions with Richard Porter 
about how raptor migration information can best be gathered in the Middle 
East. We hope that it will help provide a focus for future work and 
enable those who are interested to make a useful contribution. We look 
forward to hearing from you. 
ARABIAN WARBLERS IN JORDAN IN APRIL 1963 D. I. M. Wallace 
On 23 April 1963, I. J. Ferguson-Lees and I saw three large Sylvia 
warblers in acacias near the agricultural settlement of Safi, about 5km 
south of the Dead Sea, Jordan. On the day, we were unaware of any Arabian 
Warblers S. leucomelaena nearer than the Southern Red Sea region and 
although the birds struck us as different from the several undoubted 
migrant and/or breeding Orphean Warblers S. hortensis seen in the nearby 
highlands from 13 - 30 April, they were logged as that species. Only 
after the publication of the discovery and proven breeding of the Arabian 
Warbler in the western sector of the rift (Zahavi and Dudai 1974) did I 
suspect that we had missed something important and hence my eventual 
listing of the three birds as "more likely to have been S. leucomelaena " 
(Wallace 1984). I should have liked to have gone further, but I could not 
match my memories of the birds, assisted by some brief notes and a small 
sketch of one, to any then extant description or skin of the Arabian 
Warbler's nominate race from southwest Arabia. With both my personal 
gurus - the late Colonel Meinertzhagen and the late Kenneth Williamson - 
agreeing that the species was a Sylvia so like Orphean as to be separable 
only on structure, the only safe course was to offer an option to later 
observers . 
Time and the experience of others move on, however, and research into the 
Arabian Warbler in Israel has now produced apparently a new subspecies, 
negevensis , described from 20 birds collected between the Southern Dead 
Sea and the Gulf of Eilat (or Aqaba) by Shirihai (1988) and a full 
statement upon the identification of the species by Shirihai (1989). The 
description of the holotype and the further notes on the Israeli birds 
