Northern coastline - fishponds, sand dunes, unexplained explosions, etc.

"...then you should go to Ma'agan Michael. They have fishponds, and the migrating birds stop there," someone said.
All right.
The fishponds aren't just at Ma'agan Michael, which is a kibbutz on the coast midway between Netanya and Haifa; they stretch north for kilometers. On maps the coast looks like a net, full of blue holes.
On the ground at Ma'agan Michael it looked a bit more solid. It supported plenty of tour buses, anyway. The area is not a tourist destination and I saw no groups walking around. I weaved around the buses towards the gray herons. A car stopped.
"Do you know how you can drive onto the beach?" 
I had seen a bike pass on dirt roads beyond the fishpond, but didn't know how to get down to the shoreline. "I'm sorry, I don't know."
"You speak English?" the driver asked in English.
"I speak Hebrew, but I don't know how to get to the beach", I said quickly in Hebrew.
"It would be better if you knew how to get to the beach and didn't speak Hebrew," he said in English.
After he drove on, I turned back to a heron below the banks of a pond, which had speared a fish and was holding it proudly.

Gray heron

I walked around the fishponds and the beach (which wasn't drivable). Ibises, egrets, and others flew about by the dozens, but the place didn't seem crowded. By late afternoon I was hemmed in by No Entry signs and walked out past the kingfishers. I checked a map, found a campground a few km up the coast, and headed north on a path through the fishponds until the gunshots started. Distant ones, but I would have preferred them to be more distant. Walking further north, I heard them much closer, so much closer that I cut across to the road while humming loudly and trying to be very visible. I walked the next kilometer or so by the side of the coast road and walked back toward the fishponds once I was past the shots. A turnoff from the highway led to a dirt road, which led to...
"What's at the end?" A father and son, in dati clothing, were walking in the same direction as I was.
"I'm sorry, I don't know. I have no idea." But I kept walking. In the end, the path followed a stream down to a beach with a conspicuous lack of No Camping signs.
It was late in the day. The dunes and wildflowers already glowed orange. I found a pass between dunes as the sun set through the beachgrass and slept in the sand. I tried literally sleeping in the sand, which was a good insulator, but a cold wind blew over the beach and you can't really burrow into the sand. 
Dawn glowed orange over Zikhron Ya'aqov and Fureidis. It was light enough that I had no trouble seeing the sand dunes, soft and brown in the early morning. A few birds called, but otherwise the beach was peaceful and BAM.
What could possibly improve the morning more than random explosions to the northeast?
I walked in the other direction, back towards the stream, which rippled over the sand where it met the sea. Farther upstream, kingfishers staked out a shady pool. Even farther, egrets stalked the stream and ibises flapped around the fishponds. I walked around the dunes before heading out past the fishponds, long lens ready for birds. A family on bikes stopped by me. Actually, they stopped around me. I wasn't really surrounded but I couldn't see all of them at once. 
"What kinds of birds are around here?"

(שלדג (יש אחד שם! עכשיו אף...לא, הינה הוא

I had some idea of what they were in English, but in Hebrew?...

לבנית

אנפה

ועוד שאני לא יודע את שמם

I mentioned a few birds whose names I knew in Hebrew (some from signs in other parks; one from a random stranger who had helped me identify a kingfisher earlier in the morning) before heading north through the fishponds towards a bus stop- at least until I got boxed in by No Entry signs and headed for the road, at least until I found that the coast road has pedestrian bridges some of the time...
It was a long walk to the bus stop.