Tours by Style
Birding Trips
Most of our tours are, of course, birding tours. We offer set-departure bird tour holidays on six continents (Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and South America) and an annual birding cruise to Antarctica. We also enjoy operating private and tailor-made birding tours, so please do approach us if you want us to arrange a bespoke birdwatching vacation for you rather than anything you see on our website.
The main focus of these birding tours is often to find as many species as possible, with a focus also on locating the endemics and birds that are tough to see outside of the country in question. For example, the easiest place to see Green-breasted Pitta is in Uganda, so while it is not a Ugandan endemic we still make this a focus even more important than other bird species along the tour route.
It’s important to note that although these are very much bird-focused tours we don’t ignore other wildlife. We’ll stop and look at each species of mammal that we encounter during our birding tours, for example.
A lot of bird photographers join our birdwatching tours. But for those who really want to focus on photography rather than birding, we recommend that you instead join our birding photography trips. We do custom-made birding photography trips as well as our set date photo tours.
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What are the birding tours we most highly recommend? Well, it depends on your personal preferences. For those wanting higher trip lists, we see well over 500 bird species on our South African birding tours, our Ethiopian bird trips, of course on our East African birding tours, and on quite a number of other African birding safaris on our website. Of course, South America has more bird species than any other continent, so joining one of our bird tours to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, or Bolivia (for example) can also generate high species counts even though a lot of the birds hide better in the rainforests compared to the birds of the relatively arid and more open African plains. In Asia a trip to Borneo, Peninsular Malaysia, India, or any of the more tropical countries can also generate a high overall bird species count for the tour. Indonesia (like Borneo, in fact) is teaming with endemics and can also generate a long bird species list as well.
Madagascar has a lower than average bird species count, but an incredible proportion of this vast island’s birds are endemic, which is one of the main drawing cards (not to mention the other-worldly scenery plus all the strange mammals – lemurs, tenrecs, half the planet’s chameleons and other reptiles, etc.).
Cold-climate destinations such as Svalbard, Alaska, and Antarctica of course don’t have high bird counts, but what they do have is quality – who doesn’t like a King Eider, a King Penguin or a Tufted Puffin? Plus there is the bonus of seeing cetaceans, icebergs, and so much more.
Well, we’re world birders, and the real answer to the question “what bird tours do we most highly recommend?” is “all of them!”. Space is too limited here to talk about Australia, New Guinea and its Birds-of-paradise, Costa Rica and other parts of Central America, and the Caribbean including Cuba with the smallest bird in the world, Bee Hummingbird. Please do peruse our website and read all the birding tour itineraries on our menu.
