Whilst birding the Talea Valley in small area of permanent water with nice growths of reed mace I came across a single tree frog with several others on a grassy area near the permanent water by the dam wall. Another much larger tree frog was found in Tanoumah at Salah Al Dana. These tree frogs are H. felixarabica, which is distributed in the Arabian Peninsula and southern Levant, eastward from the Dead Sea Rift. This points to a biogeographic connection between south-western Arabia and southern Levant, and highlights the importance of the Dead Sea fault system, which probably played a primary role as a barrier when formed in the late Miocene. The new species differs from H. heinzsteinitziby absence of strong fragmentation of dark lateral stripe. In the Arabian Peninsula, H. felixarabica inhabits the regions above 1400 m a.s.l. in south-western Saudi Arabia to south-western Yemen.
