New to birding abroad (1 Viewer)

Grateful for the thoughts of experienced oversea birders.

My main interest is photographing birds in order to paint them in watercolour. I have travelled around the UK and now, newly retired, hope to collect images of overseas birds for painting on rainy English days. While I'm happy to expand my life list I'm not specifically after ticks. So to my questions:

1. My wife likes birds and is happy to hike to see them, but would not thank me for too adventurous a holiday. Climbs up windswept mountains and day long 4x4 drives into the bush would not go down too well 😢.

2. Is a guided and organised trip strictly necessary? Could we, for example, arrange a holiday to the USA or Spain, say, and organise trips ourselves to key spots.

3. If we were to go on a guided birding trip would the onus be on getting as many birds in as possible. I really wouldn't want to frustrate fellow travellers by lingering over a single bird everyone else has ticked.

Any tips gratefully received

PS. Children, work and UK holidays has resulted in neither of us having travelled abroad in 25 years. So complete novices.

Thanks

Steve and Helen

There are a non intensive birding tours offered by several of the tour companies, usually with a secondary emphasis on local culture, food or wine. These tend to be more relaxed and more accommodating of individual priorities, while still offering the advantages that a locally familiar guide provides.
A good representative example would be this Field Guides trip:
https://fieldguides.com/bird-tours/portugal-birds-and-wine

That is perhaps the least effort option, but also the most costly.
Fortunately, there is now a plethora of on line information available covering good birding sites, best scheduled visit times and transportation options. With a little research, you can easily build your own holiday.
Enjoy retirement and please keep us posted on your travels.

Steve Heath said:

2. Is a guided and organised trip strictly necessary? Could we, for example, arrange a holiday to the USA or Spain, say, and organise trips ourselves to key spots.

3. If we were to go on a guided birding trip would the onus be on getting as many birds in as possible. I really wouldn't want to frustrate fellow travellers by lingering over a single bird everyone else has ticked.

Click to expand...

As to question 2, guided trips are not necessary at all. But you will have to do a lot of preparatory work if you have no guide: making and researching travel arrangements, learning where to find the birds, and learning the bird calls and IDs. The amount of preparatory work will of course vary from country to country. Also note that there are two types of "guided trips." One is where you pay a set price to a company (typically) outside the country, and it makes all the in-country arrangements. These are the most expensive. The other is where you find local guides within the country you are traveling to, and make arrangements for them to guide you at certain locations or certain days. These are cheaper, but also more time-consuming to arrange.

As to question 3, you are correct that on standard birding tours with other participants, while photography is permitted, you're not supposed to delay the group to take pictures. There are dedicated bird photography tours, however. But I expect your wife would find these rather tedious, since a lot of time might be spent on a single bird.

A couple of ideas to think about. For the more exotic locations, where you don't speak the language, you might want to go on one fully-guided tour just so you see how things are usually done. Then for future tours you could be self-guided, but try to secure local guides for just you and your wife at particular locations. (So, e.g., go on a guided tour to Costa Rica before sampling the rest of the neotropics). Since you are the only ones being guided, you could then proceed at your own desired pace. It's also possible to have a guide for a custom tour for an extended period. Though that can be expensive in some countries.

Hope this helps.

We have never gone on a guided tour, but then we haven't travelled to exotic locations (yet). We have occasionally hired a local guide for a day or half a day, but mostly we do a fair bit of research in advance and then try to contact some local birders beforehand, through BF or BirdingPal.

This has worked really well, because nobody knows the local birds and hotspots (down to the individual tree or bush) better than the people who live there. Also this allows for a more relaxed pace, or at least one the both parties agree on, and it can be fun to to boot. We are still in touch with several of the people we have birded with abroad and those who have come to Italy and we have shown around.

Many thanks for the helpful replies, which have gone a long way to signposting our options. I will let you know our final decision and how we got on. Hopefully I'll post some paintings too.

Best wishes

Steve

Hello,

Fellow birder from Idaho USA here. I also happen to be an artist. I paint oils. I look forward to seeing paintings if you post them!

Jared

There are many easy-to-access locations in Spain that afford photographic opportunities without the need for a guide or great adventure - El Hondo near Alicante immediately springs to mind.

Anywhere you can go with a package holiday - Spain, SE Europe, Canaries (eg Teneriffe)- some will be cheap if you want to. Infrastructure for tourists and plenty of gen on here and elsewhere.

Think it would make more sense to stick with 'European' type destinations than anything too exotic if inexperienced travellers - anything slightly different from what you're used to in the UK will be still be pretty amazing.

Think about your holiday requirements as much as anything perhaps ... (temperature, cost, language barrier, type of accomodation, daily travel in a radius or all the birding you want on-site etc)

I'd suggest going somewhere like Australia or some African countries, where you won:t need a guide or even much research to see a host of spectacular birds. Just get to the edge of town and look around.

Congratulations on your newfound freedom, and I wish you the very greatest enjoyment of what will, I'm sure, seem like a new life.

I'd recommend having a good think about what types of birds/scenes/behaviour are of particular interest to you - as a painter you will probably have more interest in species and spectacles that are colourful and/or dynamic than those that are cryptic (unless of course depicting how incredibly well some birds are camouflaged is of particular interest). You could probably start off a great thread asking for ideas! Then, having identified your targets, search around for opportunities that fit your criteria re affordability and accessibility.

Tropical Birding offers photography tours to various places in the world. Not being a photographer, I haven’t looked at the tours, but it might be worth looking into.

By the way, I haven’t traveled with Tropical Birding but I believe they have an excellent reputation. I have checked out their website, though, to dream about going on some of the trips they offer.

Dave

Loads of places you can go to see birds in the Western Palearctic, combining holiday and birdwatching. Honestly, the list is endless but time of year is usually important, to coincide with spring or autumn migration.

I suppose you need to target which species you want to see and paint, sometimes a guide can be employed for a single day. Coto Donana or Lower Pyrenees/Vadiello Dam in Spain, Castro Verde (near Algarve) in Portugal, Cyprus, the Canaries (though not so many species here but specific ones), Oulu Finland via Finnature tours for owls or eagle workshops, Poland Bialowieza, Hungary, Thessalonika and Lake Kerkini in Northern Greece, Eilat Israel etc.

All relatively cheap via Ryan Air / EasyJet etc, and booking own accommodation and car hire on line.

And then there's America or Canada (Point Pelee) at migration time, or even further afield. The world's your oyster!

Although my artistic abilities are somewhat below those of your average 5 year old, I can appreciate that what you need is unlikely to be catered for by any sort of organised tour. While you clearly don't want a full-on hardcore birding tour, on the other hand I'm guessing you don't want to hang around taking 1000s of images looking for the perfect photo, because you just need it to be good enough to paint from.
I'm not a seasoned world birder like some of the respondents, but based on my own limited experience can offer the following suggestions:
- Portugal is a good place to start, specifically Faro in the Algarve. Lots of tourist flights and infrastructure, car hire reasonable, people happy to speak English. The saltpans next to Faro airport give you close-up views and pics of species such as flamingo and black-winged stilt, as well as rarer stuff like slender-billed gull - lots of other places to explore in the region, and lots of infomation available on the web. There's familiar stuff there as well, so it's not like you are suddenly inundated with a load of birds you're struggling to ID.
- I've not specifically birded in USA, but on my previous visits found car hire and travel simple, and of course people speak English. In my limited experience, which others have also mentioned, its generally easier to get closer to birds there than in Europe, and access to sites is easy by road. My non-birding son went to Sanibel Island in Florida a couple of years ago, and brought back decent pics of things like roseate spoonbills for me to ID, taken with a DSLR and kit zoom lens.
- This might seen a bit of a jump from the previous suggestions, but if you are of an artistic bent then Japan should be on your shortlist. NE Hokkaido in winter offers opportunities to get close to sea eagles and Japanese cranes against a snowy / icy backdrop. Although language is a bit more of an issue, car hire and driving is straightforward (with an international licence) plus you're driving on the left hand side of the road. And again, you're still in the Palearctic, so there are some familiar birds around like GSW and marsh / willow tits.

Great! I knew you guys would have some insight. Feeling fired up for our first foray beyond the UK. Many thanks again. Have posted a recent picture of birds on the art forum.

Best wishes

Steve

Do what most do, hit Gambia and or Goa, plenty of birds, guides if you decide you want one for the day, not huge distances plus decent accomodations if that matters to you.

Hi Steve, it really depends on who you travel with, how you travel and where you go. If you are happy to self drive there's a wealth of possibilities further afield e.g. Southern Africa. Personally I have a wide range of interests. I would not consider myself a world lister in terms of birds, I like to see and photograph birds, especially the more showy ones, but basically I will shoot anything that appears in my view, pretty much be it a bird, a flower, an insect, mammal, reptile or whatever. I do have a keen interest in mammals, especially predators and smaller, weird and unusual stuff. I'm also a qualified scuba diver. I tend to form ideas for destinations around certain species I hope to see (mostly birds and mammals depending on where I'm going) and then see which is the best option to get there. Sometimes this is a group tour safari, sometimes tailor made safari, sometimes a dedicated birding trip with friends and sometimes I hire a guide and go on my own.

As this is a birding site you may find people who are looking to form groups for travel tend to lean more towards dedicated birding and so they may be less open to spending time to get that perfect image. I find the opposite on mammalwatching.com and people there seem less inclined to stop for birds. But then a trip can be what you make of it. My next tour is a dedicated mammalwatching tour to Borneo. We will be out most nights looking for nocturnals. This is the third time I will be going to Borneo. The first tour was more general, the second again was dedicated mammal watching, did I ignore the beautiful birds? No! I was out until 3-4 am for the nocturnals, then still out walking the trails at dawn looking for birds. Yes I collapsed at my desk when I went back to work, but it was worth it!

You may find people who have less extreme interests over on safaritalk.net, this tends to attract safarigoers who tend to have a more relaxed approach to wildlife viewing and who have keen interests in photography. You will find many of my trip reports on there under this same handle. There was a perfect tour for you gioing to Goa and Nagarhole, but unfortunately it filled very quickly. maybe if there is enough interest a secound group could be planned.

Have you also considered going on a dedicated art safari, to paint in the field as it were? I keep thinking it would be nice to do that sometime.



I do occasionally paint, both with soft pastels and digitally, quite often I will be inspired to paint birds and mammals I haven't been able to get good photographs of myself. So then I work from reference photos. I don't sell my work, but if you plan to then you can also check out sites like wildlife reference photos - you can buy the rights to an image for a small fee for reference work, that saves you having to travel (but where is the fun in that?!). Here you can find a link to the shots I have made available on that site: https://wildlifereferencephotos.com/search.php?clearSearch=true&searchPhrase=Jo+Dale

Now you have the time it has never been easier to do the research. Whilst i appreciate the services and local knowledge of birders that guide and the overall ethos of Ecotourism i have never used guides. The satisfaction of finding and identifying your own stuff thru fieldcraft and your own knowledge and endeavours trumps being shown stuff imo. So what if you don’t get all the target species at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter and at the physical end of the day sitting back with a beer or a bottle of wine running thru notes, pictures and planning your own next day ahead cannot be beaten. There are exceptions such as Pelagic trips and entry into military no-go zones both of which i plan to do in the near future - just do the research and enquire on forums like this:t:

There is a network called BirdingPal which has a list of paid guides and local birders who will happily give their time to a visitor FOC although petrol money and a meal n beer afterwards would be acceptable. I used one in Istanbul and altho he was too busy to join me in the field we met for some beer and a meal to glean some information for contacts for Spring migration at Sariyer at the Black Sea end of The Bosphorus and it was very productive.

Good birding -

Laurie:t:

Many thanks Jo. Your photography is very good indeed, the rhinos are wonderful. We've been really inspired by the posts here and this section of BF overall. There really is something for every taste. We are thinking of Goa and Gambia (thanks Andy) or Spain or Texas or..... As Dan points out just the experience of seeing different birds will be amazing. Thanks All.

Good choices - Goa has Wintering Palearctic species in addition to the resident stuff and excellent cuisine. My brother and a mate went to the Gambia and had fantastic birding again Wintering and indigenous species - they never hired a guide but engaged the services of a local taxi-driver for a week who would pick up and drop off wherever and whenever. They paid what he wanted, which was reasonable, a good tip and a large 25kilo bag of Rice when they left:t:


Spain is a wonderful birding destination wherever you go but Andalusia is really good. We have been many times and the Autumn migration of raptors in September at Tarifa (opposite Tangier) is excellent with Tarifa itself being a great place to use as a base particularly if you have a car - relevant threads will give you the information you require. Check the vacational trip reports on Birdforum and particularly Cloudbirders and when you feel adventurous check out Jos Stratford’s website - he is the Indiana Jones of birding and although he might not travel to the end of the Earth he can often see it from where he is...

Laurie -

Thanks for that Laurie. Really helpful to hear the experiences of people who have made these trips. We hadn’t considered Turkey. Wonder how Brexit will impact European birding trips. Apologies for dropping the B bomb.

Thanks

Steve