Mauritius Birding (1 Viewer)

Andrew Whitehouse said:

Mauritius is a tricky place for birding. There's really not a great diversity of birds there, although there are of course some very rare endemics. Most of the later are only found in the Black River Gorges National Park, and even then can be tricky. Basically the island is awash with a small number of introduced species. You should also see a few seabirds and waders, although again probably not a huge variety. The best place I went to for waders was the Terre Rouge estuary north of Port Louis. Seabirds are best looked for at any promontory that gives reasonable views beyond the reef that surrounds the island. I mostly looked from Point aux Cannoniers in the northwest, although that was mostly because it was near where I was staying. I think in a couple of weeks of regular birding I managed 46 species.

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Jambo_Cops said:

Many thanks for your swift reply.

As I say it is our honeymoon, So It will be far from regular twitching. Just something we really want to take a few days out to do while we are out there, once in a lifetime trip etc. My wife to be is a young twitcher too, which is always handy.

Some of the articles I found were about seabirds, many about the kestrel and other endemics.

We are planning on travelling around the island as much as we can on top of the normal honeymoon relaxing, so from your point of view would you say you can fit birding in with a bus ride?

Many thanks again, massive help.

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Andrew Whitehouse said:

In some ways it's quite a good place for fitting birding in around other holiday activities, because there aren't a huge number of places to go or birds to see! You can get to some places by bus but if you want to go to Black River Gorges then I think you'd need to hire a car or a taxi (unless things have changed - I was there about 8 or 9 years ago). If you want to see most of the endemics then you'll probably need to spend a certain amount of time in the area - you won't get everything in a day unless you're fortunate. Apart from the Grey White-eye, which is common all over the island, the endemics are all quite scarce, localised and often fairly unobtrusive. The Olive White-eye and the Fody are probably the toughest. The road above Bassin Blanc can be productive for these. You should see things like White-tailed Tropicbird around Black River Gorges, which are impressive. As I say though, you'll need to arrange transport, go there a few times and probably do a fair bit of walking and searching!

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Jambo_Cops said:

Bloody brilliant information thank you!
We have gone no holds barred when it comes to where we are staying, al travel around the island paid for in via private driver. we are from Sheffield so to have something like this is surely like what a lot of our residents get by stealing local cars!
The ones I personally want are the Olive white-eye and the Kestrel.

I was reading that they're version of the wildlife trust has been doing an awful lot of conservation work. Just can't seem to find that much information on things.

Some brilliant info, thank you.

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