Operation in Israel, Fall 1967 to Spring 1969 
I 
The report on the Israel portion of the Palearctic Migratory 
Bird Survey is presented separately for political but not for bio¬ 
logical reasons. Throughout the project it became increasingly more 
difficult to work simultaneously in both Israel and Egypt. Although 
it was known to the Israeli collaborators that the PMS was operating 
in Egypt, no reciprocal information was volunteered for fear that the 
project would be expelled from Egypt. Unfortunately, it was also im¬ 
possible to exchange personnel back and forth across borders nor for 
the field teams to compare data as it was collected. This meant that 
for two years, the PMS maintained two entirely separate bird trapping 
operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. No attempt was made at com¬ 
parison of migration data for the two localities in the main body of 
the report, but preliminary comparisons are made between the abundance 
of a few species in this section. 
When the June 1967 hostilities made it impossible to operate in 
Egypt, the PMS was granted permission to band birds and collect a 
limited number of specimens in Israel beginning in late fall of that 
year. It was not feasible to pursue an active blood collecting 
program in Israel, however, because of the strong conservation 
orientation of the local sponsors, Professor H. Mendelsohn and Dr. A. 
Zahavi of Tel-Aviv University, part of the field team that had worked 
in Cyprus earlier in the fall moved to Israel in mid November. 
133 
