Agamon Hula

The Hula Valley runs about 25 kilometres by 6 and covers roughly 177 square kilometres. Before 1951 its southern end held a lake of about 14 square kilometres with some 31 square kilometres of swamp round it. KKL-JNF drained the lot between 1951 and 1958, cutting more than 40 kilometres of canals across roughly 62,000 dunams, and the reclaimed ground became farmland and the basis for Kiryat Shmona.

The reasons for undoing part of it were practical rather than sentimental. Exposed peat caught fire and burned underground, fertiliser-laden water ran downstream into the Sea of Galilee, and some of the reclaimed land turned out to be poor for cultivation as the groundwater sank. In the early 1990s KKL-JNF decided that a flooded surface was worth more to the valley than a cultivated one, largely to stop the pollution reaching the lake. Hebrew Wikipedia's account puts 80 million shekels into the project and says it took two years of controlled flooding to finish.

What came out is an engineered pond rather than a restored wetland: roughly one square kilometre of water, dotted with islands used as protected nesting sites, sitting on former fields. Nothing here is the original swamp. The remnant of genuine papyrus wetland is a separate place three quarters of an hour to the south, the Hula Nature Reserve, run by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority behind its own gate and its own ticket. Confusing the two is the commonest mistake made in planning a day in this valley, and the two operators do not sell a joint ticket.

Until the middle of the twentieth century only a few cranes wintered in Israel at all. Numbers in the low thousands began staying from the mid-1970s, mostly in the Jezreel and Hefer valleys, and by the early 1990s the Hula Valley had become the main wintering site while the others emptied. The pull is a combination of things: a position on a central migration axis, the new lake and the neighbouring nature reserve as safe roosts, drainage canals that make water and food easy to reach, and peanuts left in the fields after the summer harvest, which stay edible until the first rains soak them.

That combination cost the valley's farmers heavily through the 1990s. The damage fell on winter crops sown straight after the first rains, exactly when the crane count peaks and the peanuts stop being worth eating, and chickpeas, peas and potatoes are all good crane food. In 1999 the response was to build the birds somewhere better to eat. From early December, once most of the passage birds have gone south, 2 to 3 tonnes of maize are scattered daily across a designated open area, not from feeders but off the back of farm vehicles, and the feeding runs until the middle of March, when the wintering flock leaves north. KKL-JNF's own English page for the park describes it as two tonnes a day. Between late September and mid-November the cranes are left to work the harvested fields, where they do some good by clearing volunteer peanut seed.

The arrangement is a joint one and its membership explains a lot about the site's politics: KKL-JNF, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the farmers of the Hula Valley, with research by KKL-JNF and the Society funded by the United States Forest Service. The feeding is simultaneously crop protection, conservation and the main tourist attraction on the site, and those three purposes do not always want the same thing.

The visitor centre is the largest structure on the site and the newest. KKL-JNF's own project page describes about 3,000 square metres over two levels, built in partnership with JNF Canada, with a wall of live camera feeds from around the lake, an auditorium and cinema for nature films, a gallery floor, a shop and cafe, and an observation deck over the wetland. It gives January 2009 as the start of construction and lists no final cost. Hebrew Wikipedia, citing a ynet report, puts the opening in 2019 after ten years of building, names the centre for the former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and gives a figure of about 130 million shekels; that cost has only the one source and should be read as such.

The botanical garden is older and much quieter. The operator dates it to 2009, gives its size as about 30 dunams and says it holds roughly 100 species of marsh and water plants, assembled both to show what grew here in the days of the lake and to keep rare and threatened wetland plants going. It is one of the few parts of the site with a genuinely accessible path.

Two research operations sit alongside the tourism. The Hula Birding Centre was set up in 2001 by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, and runs a bird ringing station jointly with KKL-JNF along with surveys and public tours. The wildlife acclimation centre opened in 2020, a joint venture of KKL-JNF and Tel-Hai Academic College led by Yaron Cherka, KKL-JNF's chief ornithologist, and the veterinarian Rona Nadler Valency: a clinic with chick cages and acclimation cages that gives first treatment to injured wild animals from the Galilee and the Golan before they go on to the wildlife hospital at Ramat Gan, and returns recovered ones to the wild.

Against all that, note what is not open. The operator's English page states that the Water Fowl and the Crane lookouts remain closed to the public for security reasons, and that two-person vehicles are not available for hire until further notice. The site itself was shut during the fighting in the north from 2023 and reopened in December 2024; the 10 shekel reopening rate advertised on the same page expired on 31 March 2025 and had not been taken down when the page was read in August 2026, which is a fair warning about how current the English text is.

• Visitor centre: about 3,000 sq m on two levels, live camera wall, auditorium, gallery, observation deck
• Botanical garden: about 30 dunams, roughly 100 marsh and water plant species, from 2009
• Ringing station, run with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel since 2001
• Wildlife acclimation centre, with Tel-Hai Academic College, since 2020
• Water Fowl and Crane lookouts: closed to the public for security reasons

At the end of 2021 avian influenza broke out among the cranes at Agamon Hula and spread into poultry houses across northern Israel. The Times of Israel later put the crane deaths at an estimated 8,000 and noted the true figure could be higher. Zoologists quoted in Haaretz argued that the density of birds packed round a feeding ground had sharply accelerated the infection, and the outbreak produced immediate calls to reconsider whether the flock should be fed at all.

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority's answer has been to shrink the operation rather than end it. Feeding now starts at the end of December instead of early December, finishes at the end of February instead of running through March, and the quantity has been cut by about a tenth. The wintering count fell with it, from roughly 40,000 birds to somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 by the winter of 2022 to 2023. Ohad Hazofe, the Authority's avian ecologist, framed the calculation as a balance between tourism, the farmers' needs and the obligation to do what is best for the birds. A five-year phase-out was agreed with the farmers, but the government fell before compensation for the crop damage that would follow was settled, and the ecologist Yifat Artzi has pointed out that the falling numbers describe the birds that stay the winter, not the far harder to count birds passing through at night.

The row is older than the outbreak. Feeding cost about 5 million shekels a year by 2019, when the wintering flock had reached some 50,000 against about 15,000 twenty years earlier. In December 2019 farmers began driving cranes off the area with lights, under a permit from the Parks Authority; KKL-JNF, which runs the site, called it a breach of trust, froze its working relationship with the Authority including the crane project budget, and the Authority then froze its own permit. The parties made up. The questions underneath, who pays and what to do about a flock that keeps growing, were not settled, and researchers and managers still differ over them.

KKL-JNF gives the circuit round the lake as 8.5 kilometres and calls it easy and flat, running beside the water and through orchards past a series of viewpoints. Private vehicles are barred from the interior, with an exception for a licensed vehicle carrying a disabled permit, so the loop is walked, cycled, driven in a hired electric cart or ridden in a booked wagon. On foot it is a two to three hour proposition with stops; the hire terms are built round shorter visits than that.

Bicycles go out for three hours, which the operator calls the right amount of time for the site: ₪51 for a single, ₪43 for a child's bike for ages 8 to 12, and ₪71 to ₪192 for the four-wheeled BERG machines, single up to four-seater. Electric carts go for an hour and a half, ₪200 for four seats and ₪261 for six. Helmets are compulsory on the bicycles. Personal electric bicycles, electric scooters and any other electric device are banned outright, which regularly catches out visitors who assume the rule cannot apply to them because the site hires out electric carts itself.

The tractor-drawn hiding wagon is the thing most people book and the reason to arrive before dawn. It is a covered wagon that goes into closed ecological areas shut to walkers, letting passengers get close to the flocks without scattering them. The sunrise tour runs about an hour and a half to two hours and includes tea and biscuits at ₪86 for an adult and ₪65 for a child; the daytime tour is about an hour at ₪60 and ₪51; sunset is about an hour and a quarter at ₪65 and ₪55; a photographers' sunrise runs about two hours at ₪150 and comes without a guide talking over it. Twilight and night tours run in summer. All of them require booking in advance.

The rest of the tariff is small and worth knowing: ₪25 for binoculars with guidance, ₪20 for the virtual reality flight with the cranes, ₪400 for a private nature guide for two hours. Pets are not admitted for ecological reasons, and drones and balloons are banned.