Nature Travel Specialists
nature, wildife, adventure and general travel

Birding

As birding travel is a style of wildlife tour pretty much unto itself, we thought we'd devote a few pages just to it. This page is for those among us who don't think it's strange to be looking the other way at the Taj Mahal (at least for a while) because there's a house crow across the road, or consider that spending a few days at a lodge where there's no TV, no nightlife nearby, and the only thing to do is to get up early and look at both beautiful and brown birds seems a good thing. That's not to say that birds aren't an important component of all of our natural history trips, but if you're traveling to one of our destinations just to bird, these are your pages. (For this reason the pages, and images, will take a bit longer to download - we didn't compress them as much, so they are clearer)

Nature Travel Specialists does not operate birding tours, but we do know which ones may suit you best, and we know our birds pretty well (our Director, Andrew Haffenden, has personally seen over two-thirds of Australia's, and conducted field research on magpie geese, brolgas and sarus cranes there for many years. That's him on the right with Dyak headman on the Upper Mahakam River, Borneo, the day after having two groups of white-shouldered ibis). We also recognize that many birders like to organize their own travel, so we have included lots of links to companies and accommodations that you can contact directly. If there's anything we can do for you along the way - there's lots of aspects of comfortable and successful travel other than just booking tours and hotels - we'd be happy to so. If not, that's fine too; please explore these links, contact the companies, and good birding. We won't mind, however, if you tell the people you're booking with where you found them.

While we're on the subject, if you haven't already been there, visit the Worldtwitch site. It's one of our our favorites for up to date world-wide birding information, book and equipment reviews, field reports, birding links, and general, sometimes delightfully ascerbic, comments. Other good sites are also included throughout as links. It's pretty much oriented towards the heavy lister, however. Another favorite, and less listing-oriented, site with even more information than Worldtwitch is Fatbirder. There's not much to do with birding that can't be found here. They also have good information regarding disabled birding and natural history travel (and a funnies section). Birdforum is a free membeship bird forum site, with thousands upon thousands of relevant posts on all bird topics, and parts of the world, from ID to where to find to computer programs, digiscoping and pretty much everything.

In the US the American Birding Association and it's various blogs, links and advertisements is a good place to start - click on the Bird of the Year logo to go their website.

Please see our Australian birding pages for local Australian birding companies that we like and work with.

Guyana bird tours will are starting in 2012 - September 6 is our first - and we don't exaggerate when we say this is one of the best and most diverse birding areas in the world, with untouched rainforest, tepuis, savannas, riverine forest and coastal flats.