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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Anyone else got a plan a and plan b trip? (1 Viewer)

Costa Rica will still take you, pariahs or not - at least I think :) And I can really recommend it, everything works here pretty much normally.
 
Fine if you want ten days in a hotel upon return which you'll pay £1750 for.
Surely there must be an intermediate country that's not on the UK red list and isn't too fussed about you coming from Costa Rica? Much better to spend ten days in freedom there than in hotel quarantine in the UK. Maybe Spain?

We could do with a birdforum Covid travel strategy forum.
 
Surely there must be an intermediate country that's not on the UK red list and isn't too fussed about you coming from Costa Rica? Much better to spend ten days in freedom there than in hotel quarantine in the UK. Maybe Spain?

We could do with a birdforum Covid travel strategy forum.
Some people did that using Turkey until that went red too.
 
Some people did that using Turkey until that went red too.
Yes, but if you're not prepared to take the risk of an orange country going red then that rules out going to any orange countries in the first place. Hotel quarantine would be hell and if I found myself in a red country I would be prepared to travel around abroad for a long time until I found a way to avoid it.

btw my plans are simply to take trips to Scotland when the weather looks good. And mostly to camp there, because hotel accommodation is now such a hassle.
 
I guess that if you don't have the NHS App, and don't go anywhere you might have to check in, for the ten days before your trip you should be OK.
Can you explain what you mean?

Get 'pinged' a week before your jollies and it's game over? I wonder what happens if you get pinged a few days after you've left, ignore the message, delete it, deny ever having seen it?
 
I think if you get 'pinged' it's only advisory, so you could ignore it, but probably better not to have the app so you don't get the ping in the first place. If you're on holiday abroad then I think you're bound to ignore it, aren't you?

If you get contacted by Test and Trace while you're in the UK and told to self-isolate then you can't leave the house, so certainly can't go off flying somewhere. If they contact you while you're abroad, then I've no idea. Probably they have no idea either.
 
More positive, travel within the EU for persons with the EU vaccination pass is basically back to normal now - minimal restrictions, just normal common sense stuff like mask requirements, etc (accepted this is of little benefit to UK residents).
 
More positive, travel within the EU for persons with the EU vaccination pass is basically back to normal now - minimal restrictions, just normal common sense stuff like mask requirements, etc (accepted this is of little benefit to UK residents).
Yes, even for travel to "high risk countries" – which means that since yesterday I can officially drive to the Netherlands without getting nervous!

The German website to get digital proof of your vaccination is apparently not working though (I need to go to a pharmacy to get this – try again tomorrow), so I'll have to carry my yellow booklet with me.
 
Not like it's going to help us much in the short term but seems like there's a legal challenge to the hotel quarantine rules here with the price being charged having just risen from £1,750 to £2,285.

 
We've got a trip planned to an orange-list country in October - Portugal - and were just discussing what to do if it went 'red' when we were there. As Andy points out, £2285.00 is ridiculous for basically being imprisoned in a hotel, but my reading of the rules is that you can avoid this by spending at least 10 days in an amber list country before returning to UK. Provided we are allowed to cross borders with our NHS app and UK residence status (we're Irish and Swiss citizens, but I'm not sure if this would actually give us any more travel rights in the absence of an EU vaccination certificate), the preferable thing to do would be to go on to a third country and wait it out in comfort and freedom.
 
We've got a trip planned to an orange-list country in October - Portugal - and were just discussing what to do if it went 'red' when we were there. As Andy points out, £2285.00 is ridiculous for basically being imprisoned in a hotel, but my reading of the rules is that you can avoid this by spending at least 10 days in an amber list country before returning to UK. Provided we are allowed to cross borders with our NHS app and UK residence status (we're Irish and Swiss citizens, but I'm not sure if this would actually give us any more travel rights in the absence of an EU vaccination certificate), the preferable thing to do would be to go on to a third country and wait it out in comfort and freedom.
Spain accepts the UK certificate (as do a number of other EU countries) - if fully vaccinated, you do not need to test or isolate to enter Spain, but do need to fill in the online Spanish passenger arrival form. This is checked on arrival at the airport, not sure about land borders.
 
The full, updated list of UK 'red list' countries which includes many of the major birding countries. Add to this the various nations where we're not welcome anyway, I have no hope of planning anything abroad for at least another year.

Afghanistan
Angola
Argentina
Bangladesh
Bolivia
Botswana
Brazil
Burundi
Cape Verde
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cuba
Democratic Republic of Congo
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Eswatini
Ethiopia
Egypt
Eritrea
French Guiana
Georgia
Guyana
Haiti
Indonesia
Kenya
La Reunion
Lesotho
Malawi
Maldives
Mayotte
Mexico
Mongolia
Montenegro (from 4am on Monday 30 August)
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nepal
Oman
Pakistan
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Rwanda
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Somalia
South Africa
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Suriname
Tanzania
Thailand (from 4am on Monday 30 August)
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Uganda
Uruguay
Venezuela
Zambia
Zimbabwe\
 
I had made plans to attend a conference in Palm Beach in Florida this coming December, which would have given me another crack at various missing ABA birds. However our school recently changed some policies (I think to basically "force" instructors to return to a fully in-class instructional model, even if some were hesitant), which meant I was going to probably have to withdraw my participation anyway.

However the conference ended up getting pushed back to August 2022, thanks to the delta variant...and well...Florida. I am pretty sure they would have maybe still tried to do an in-person meeting had the conference been in Massachusetts or Oregon, but De Santis has been doing everything in his power to make it difficult to stop the spread of COVID (Banning vaccine mandates for private businesses and mask mandates for local governments, etc). So now COVID is surging worst than ever in the state, and I don't think the conference committee have any confidence things will be safer in the state in December.

On the plus side I guess is that a August meeting will mean that some birds that I need still should still be around, where they wouldn't be for a December meeting. Stuff like Gray Kingbird, Black-whiskered Vireo, and so forth.
 
I just booked a flight to Seattle for a few days of birding in early October. I’ve never birded the Pacific Northwest before, but because I’ve birded extensively in other parts of the American West, there are only a couple of potential lifers on land.

However, I also booked a place on a Westport pelagic trip on which I could get up to five lifers at sea.

I had hoped to take two or three international birding trips this year, but because of Covid, like many, I’ve been stuck in the US. I went on mop-up trips to Texas in March, Idaho in June, and then to Washington in October. Obviously I would have ticked many, many more lifers on international trips, but the good thing is that I’ve gone to places and seen birds in the US that I wouldn’t have seen had I gone on those international trips.

Dave
 
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With only the USA open to birding for now, and not many lifers left in the lower 48, planning a trip is now like a variation of the Traveling Salesman Problem; how best to get King Rail, Dovekie, Colima Warbler, and other scattered birds.
 
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