Now that summer’s heating up the horizon, it’s time to cover this past winter’s visits to the numerous vernal pools we have in our general area of the Mercaz, the centre of the country. Generally speaking, blog posts capture the events of a single-day adventure, but sometimes there’s simply not enough to write about per adventure, and thus one post covers a number of mini adventures. This post will be dedicated to covering five vernal pool visits which spanned the few months between the middle of November and the beginning of February, and generally featured just Adam Ota and I – although some trips included others, namely Bracha and our friends Nick and Talia.

Vernal pools are seasonal pools of water which occur in the wet season and serve as a temporary habitat for mostly amphibians and insects of sorts. However, come summer and the pools dry up completely, leaving no trace of the lush wetlands that existed during the winter months prior. Being nature fiends, Adam and I have a list of interesting creatures to find – namely triops and newts, and these can be found almost exclusively in and around vernal pools. So, this winter we redoubled our efforts and visited vernal pools around the Mercaz to maximise the chances of finding such elusive creatures.

Our first vernal pool was visited in a two-prong trip to the North Tel Aviv coast, an area that we have explored countless times. I had seen many exciting eBird reports in the previous week or so and convinced Adam to come along for a little adventure, in hopes that we’d find some appealing birdlife. Our walk along the edge of the wild duneland led us to the Levinsky College vernal pool, which was vibrant with life. Quite extraordinarily, all of our birding expectations were met – with sightings of two choice birds. First was the penduline tit, which we had first and only ever seen at the International Birding and Research Center in Eilat (IBRCE), and then was a moustached warbler – our very first.

A greater short-toed lark flying over the dunes gave us great joy, and the discovery of a dead robin at the vernal pool’s edge gave us great sadness. We sat beside the pool, in the shade of some bamboo-like reeds, and watched as a stranger prowled the water’s edge in tall rubber boots, armed with a net and a Canon 5Ds camera. This helped inspire us to renew our attempts at finding aquatic treasures in the many other vernal pools around us. We packed up our bags and set out for what we had hoped to be another vernal pool, located just north of the neighbourhood of Afeka, in North Tel Aviv.

Our journey took us across Road 2, also known as the Coastal Road, and down a long dusty road which ended with giant car parks. We activated GPS location and targeted a bumpy dirt path which appeared to be taking us in the right direction. It was a delightful little meandering which gave us a lookout over a large field – where we found some buzzards – and then a muddy, shady trail which took us to Nachal Achiya, a stream that could not be easily forded. Eventually, we crossed on a shifting bridge of garbage that clogged a large metal gate erected to presumably filter trash. It was an odd moment, but on the other side of the stream we found a nice area that was marked as a vernal pool – but it was bone dry.

Discouraged but not despondent, we carried on until we found a map of sorts which promised other exciting things to see in the area. Most exciting was a series of ancient Samaritan burial caves, hewn out of the kurkar bedrock just half a kilometre away. These eight caves were initially discovered in 1951, when road work was being done nearby, and date to the 4th-5th centuries CE. Excavations of these hewn caves revealed a trove of archaeological finds, including oil lamps, glass vessels, rings and more. Today, however, the finds are in a museum and the site is sadly somewhat neglected.

Our hike there took us to a small hillock where Adam quite unexpectedly found a jewel beetle, which excited him to no end. Then, what felt like ages later, we made our way to the burial caves and examined them one at a time. I’ve always had a thing for caves, and although these relatively shallow, man made caves aren’t quite as grand, there’s something charming about the sudden drop of temperature and the darkness within. Perhaps most interesting, some of the caves featured the iconic “rolling rock” doors, a construction style which can be found at other ancient tombs such as Horvat Midras and Tel Abu Shusha.

The day had grown late after such an elaborate adventure and so we resolved to make our way back via bus, which could be taken from the nearby neighbourhood. Much to our surprise, on the path leaving the nature area, we bumped into a young man who we had once excavated with for a short period of time. Ah, the joys of seeing familiar faces.

The next adventure was to the vernal pool of Kfar Yarok, also just north of Tel Aviv, of which I had heard good things about in the days prior to our trip. It was not an aquatic creature which had caught my attention, but rather the presence of a large flock of rooks – fascinating crows of which a small portion of the population winters in Israel. I had seen a rook once or twice up north, but now was an opportunity to see a lot of them, and quite close by. The vernal pool sealed the deal for Adam, and the two of us embarked on a short twofold mission one afternoon in the end of November.

After a short bus ride we made our way through the Kfar Yarok youth village and promptly to the green fields which were said to contain this flock of rooks. We scoured the fields with our binoculars yet couldn’t see anything of the sort, so we decided to walk towards the vernal pool henceforth. As nature always does, we were surprised to spot a peregrine falcon resting on a large electric pylon not too far away. Every sighting of the magnificent peregrine is elating, and our spirits were boosted as we continued walking. Soon enough, we spotted a handful of rooks that had snuck over to one of the green fields while we were distracted with the falcon. Before long there were dozens of them, perhaps even a hundred, sharing the insect-rich field with hundreds of swooping swallows and other crow species.

As the sun was slowly sinking, ushering in the early evening, we found the vernal pool and its resident mallards and Egyptian geese. Adam deftly checked the murky waters for interesting creatures with his handy little net, but didn’t find anything that interested me. We dabbled here and there, and then resigned to heading back to our respective homes, still feeling achieved with our bird sightings earlier.

It was at the very end of December that Adam made a significant breakthrough. He was incidentally in the nearby city of Rosh HaAyin when he chanced upon a tiny, neglected vernal pool located between some residential houses and a road. What he found there shocked him, because after years of searching for triops, he found not one species, but two – and the second one is quite rare! He sent me pictures, almost in disbelief of his good fortune, and we agreed to make a trip of it to properly examine the finds.

It was just a few days later that Adam and I, joined with friends Nick and Talia, set out to go explore this new vernal pool. We had a side mission, and that was to tidy up the place – as it was embarrassingly littered and in dire need of some intervention. A single bus ride later we walked up to the site and Adam exclaimed that the pool had partially dried up since his previous visit. But, no matter, the triops were even easier to find now as they squirmed around in the marshy grass. True to his initial assumption, there were in fact two species of triops, or tadpole shrimp: Lepidurus apus and the even rarer Triops cancriformis.

Alongside these wiggling living fossils, which bear resemblance to the much larger horseshoe crab, we found other signs of aquatic life. Fairy shrimp as well as what appeared to be river frog tadpoles squirmed around in the shallow, vegetation-filled water. We spent a good long time there taking pictures and enjoying the incredible richness of life in this seemingly indifferent puddle. When we were done we opened up the large garbage bags that we had brought and did our best to clean the place up, for ourselves, others and of course, nature itself.

The final vernal pool that we visited was that of Neve Gan, another neighbourhood of Northern Tel Aviv, and took place in the beginning of February. Geographically quite close to both the vernal pools of Kfar HaYarok (approx. 1 kilometre away) and Afeka (approx. 900 metres away), we had somehow missed visiting it earlier on in the wet season. It was largely due to some Facebook posts about adult southern banded newts (Ommatotriton vittatus) and Middle East tree frogs (Hyla savignyi) that inspired us to go find these exciting species on our own (see HERE, for example). This time it was at night with Bracha joining us; we drove over to the site armed with flashlights and cameras, hoping to document some choice amphibians.

It had rained a bit just before we arrived, and as such, the long grass was wet with a myriad of droplets. It wasn’t long into our little trek around the nature patch behind the new residential buildings that our shoes and legs were soaked through and through. We found the vernal pool – a small placid pond lined with grasses – and tried our best to find frogs and newts, but to no avail. The most ironic part was that the noise was deafening, with the throaty calls of a thousand frogs filling the night air. Alas, no matter how hard we looked, we failed to find even one cacophonous culprit. Sure we were happy to visit, but we had really hoped to find at least one elusive newt, especially with the ongoing building projects that threaten the very existence of this urban treasure, despite the noble efforts of some eco-friendly residents (see their Facebook group HERE).

Before long the wet season was coming to an end and the vernal pools were drying up one after the next, finishing yet another successful round in that delicate circle of life. We had achieved a nice handful of visits – Adam even more so with independent excursions to the vernal pools of Petach Tikva and Holon – and we revelled in finding not one, but two species of triops which had evaded us for so long. Perhaps this upcoming winter will result in us finding both newts and salamanders, the latter only found in the northern third of the country. Until then, we have two migration periods and the long hot summer when the dunes come to life.