The Hula Valley – Bird Migration

Yesterday we went on a tour up north to see the Hula Valley.  It’s north of the Kinerret, the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by mountains on all sides.  It’s just a bit south of Kfar Blum, where we had gone tubing down the Jordan River last year.  The valley is bounded by the Golan heights to the East and the Naftali Mountains of the upper Galilee to the West.  To the south are basalt hills formed by extinct volcanic activity which restrict the flow of the Jordan River into the Kinerret and are what caused the original Lake Hula and the surrounding swampland to form.  Up until the late 1950s, malaria was endemic to the region due to mosquitos that bred in the swampland.  

From 1951-1958 the JNF (Jewish National Fund) supported a project to drain the swamps and the lake in order to get rid of malaria and to use the area for farming.  They did this both by widening the Jordan River south of the valley to increase water flow out of the lake and swamps and also by diverting the few tributaries which fed the area from the north.  They were successful in eradicating malaria and in drying out the land, but the peat in the now-dry soil apparently began to self-ignite due to some bacterial process now that it was exposed to the outside air, causing underground fires (sounds strange, and I have no idea what that must have looked like but it doesn’t sound nice. In fact, when I heard the tour guide say that in his Israeli accented English, about the “underground fires” I wasn’t even sure I heard him correctly until I looked it up later and – sure enough – that’s what happened. super weird.) The fires eventually turned the peat-soil into dry dust, so that the area wasn’t really useable as farmland and created a lot of unanticipated bad chemical runoff into the Kinerret.

Finally, in 1994, they decided to re-flood parts of the area (not quite as full as before, mainly just a smaller version of the lake and some controlled rivers and smaller lakes, less swampland, etc.)  So now its a national park and tourist area.  And the migratory birds, which had left when it was drained, have returned and are a major tourist attraction.  

The main birds are cranes, (but there are ibis, egrets, herons, and others) and apparently they migrate from Europe and literally fly all the way down to Africa every winter.   The Cranes stop here in Israel to rest and eat, since the next leg in their journey entails flying over a huge desert with no stops on the way to central Africa.  The tour guide says its like a gas station for them where they fuel up before the flight over the desert where there’s nothing to eat for them.  They apparently each eat – each bird – a kilogram of fish per day from the lake!  There are thousands of them, its pretty incredible to see – like you’re on a National Geographic show or something.  

There’s a paved loop around the park where you can rent bicycles to use, or electric golf carts (kids chose the golf carts 🙄) and then we did a sunset tour where they had a huge tractor pulling a big wagon, sort of like a section of bleachers with wooden benches.  It was very well done.  I highly recommend it if you’re ever in the neighborhood 😀.