Arabian lark | Eremalauda eremodites

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Voice

The song is a short, sweet, jingling little phrase with a faintly metallic ring, repeated over and over. It sings from the ground or from a low bush, and also in a slow, fluttering song flight in which it hangs high over the plain before sailing down again. The call is a short, dry chirrp, usually from a small party lifting and moving off. Song comes mainly in the weeks after rain, when the plain turns briefly green; in a dry year a whole area can stay silent all winter.

Identification

A small, compact lark of 13–14 cm, with a big rounded head and a short tail — the proportions of a finch more than of a lark. The bill is short, deep-based and purely conical, pale pink to horn, and looks too heavy for the bird carrying it. Upperparts pale sandy with fine dark streaks on crown and mantle; underparts white with a light buff wash and fine streaking confined to the breast sides. The face is pale, with a narrow dark line behind the eye, a dark moustachial stripe framing the ear-coverts, and a pale ring around a large dark eye. The best mark shows as the bird flushes and lands: the tail is black with white outer feathers, and that black-and-white cuts sharply against the plain sandy rump. Legs pale pink. It runs in short quick steps, then stands stock still and vanishes into the ground colour.

Confusion species

This is the place to slow down, because four other pale larks walk the same plains. Bar-tailed lark is just as small and just as pale and is thinly spread through the Negev and the Arava, but it is plain sandy above with no streaking, has a blank, unmarked face with no eye-line or moustachial, a smaller and finer grey bill and — the decisive point — a rusty-orange tail with a broad black terminal band, not a black tail with white sides. Desert lark is bigger, greyer and darker, with a longer and more pointed bill, plain plumage, and a tail that is dark-tipped but has no white at the sides. Mediterranean short-toed lark is slimmer, longer-tailed and longer-legged, with a clearly streaked breast, a smaller bill and nothing like the same heavy head. Greater short-toed lark is larger, with a clean white breast bearing a small dark neck patch and much longer tertials. Thick-billed lark shares the same stony Negev plains and also carries a heavy bill, but that bill is enormous, blue-grey and angular, and the bird itself is much larger, with a boldly marked black-and-white face and a broad white trailing edge to the wing. Temminck's lark, with its black-and-white face and two black horns, cannot be confused at all. When in doubt, wait until the bird flies: the tail settles it.

Habitat

Flat sand and gravel plains with widely spaced low bushes and tussocks, wadi beds with acacia, and the transition from sandy plain to bare hamada; also the fringes of salt flats and the loess plains of the western Negev. It needs the combination: plenty of open bare ground to walk over, and enough low scrub to set seed and to shade the nest scrape. A completely bare plain is no use to it, and neither is closed cover.

Range and movements

A bird of the Arabian Peninsula which, inside the area of this guide, holds the Negev and the Arava in Israel together with the south of Jordan; it has turned up a handful of times in south-eastern Turkey. It does not migrate but wanders widely, following the winter rains, so that a plain can be full one year and empty the next. A taxonomic note belongs here, because it decides the map. This guide follows AviList, which since 2025 keeps two species in the genus: this one and Dunn's lark, Eremalauda dunni. Most record databases and the older handbooks still lump them under that second name, which is why Dunn's lark appears on plenty of lists as an Israeli breeder. Dunn's lark itself is the bird of the southern edge of the Sahara — from Mauritania through Mali and Chad to central Sudan — and so stays south of this map; only around Merzouga in south-eastern Morocco does it appear now and then, in one year and not the next, and those irregular visitors are not enough to earn it a place of its own in this guide.

• Resident
• Winter
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

The classic ground is the Uvda valley north-west of Eilat; beyond that, the plains around Yotvata in the Arava and the loess flats at Nizzana and Ezuz in the western Negev are the places to try. Go after a wet winter — in a dry year there is nothing to find — and work the flat stretches with widely spaced bushes slowly from the car, because walking only pushes the birds away. Often the first sign is a small party lifting, and then that black-and-white tail is all you need. On the ground it is harder: the bird runs a few steps, freezes and is lost in the substrate. At first light, sit quietly by a water point or a damp hollow and wait — that pays off more often than searching does. And do not settle for the first pale lark you see: always check bill and tail.

Conservation status

Not threatened (LC). The range is a good deal smaller than that of Dunn's lark — the Arabian Peninsula, with an arm reaching into southern Jordan, the Arava and the Negev — but it is still a wide one, and the Red List now assesses the bird under its own name. Density is low everywhere and the birds shift with the rain, so nobody really knows how many there are: an area can be empty for three years and full in the fourth. The pressures are the same as for the other seed-eating desert birds — overgrazing that strips the low shrub layer and with it the seed supply, the drying out of wadis, and growing off-road traffic. In Israel there is the further point that flat open desert is exactly where solar farms, roads and military training grounds end up, and that is precisely the ground this lark has to live on. On the scale of Arabia as a whole, none of it yet weighs heavily enough to put the species in trouble.

Scientific name

Eremalauda eremodites (Meinertzhagen, 1923) (GBIF: Eremalauda dunni)

Meinertzhagen described the species in 1923 as Pyrrhulauda eremodites; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Eremalauda was introduced in 1926 by Sclater. Eremalauda joins Ancient Greek erēmos, 'desert', to Latin alauda, 'lark'. eremodites is Ancient Greek and again begins with erēmos, 'desert'; the second element is linked to hodites, 'traveller'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sheikh Othman, Yemen.