BirdingPal? Other options for non-tour exotic birding? (1 Viewer)

My husband and I will be travelling to India (Hyderabad) at the very end of May and beginning of June. My husband will be spending most of the time in a conference, but I will have the entire 7+ days free to bird.

A friend of mine suggested using BirdingPal to find a local expert to bird with. And, indeed there are 10 different local birders signed up on the site for Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh. But I'm feeling leery. It feels strange to make arrangement to meet some entirely unknown Indian man and go birding with him.

So, is there anyone here who can vouch for BirdingPals? Or who has ideas for vetting possible birding guides? Or any opinion on the matter?

And, yes, in case anyone is curious, I know that this is not the best season to go birding in India .... but it's what I have!

[ETA: I just saw that you have a forum on Birding Companions. Maybe this post should have gone in there. Sorry! Wasn't sure where to post the thread]

melisande, I see this is only your second post, so welcome to birdforum!

Being in the situation you describe, I would search for trip reports to that area (preferably from independent travelers as opposed to group tours) and see if any of them mentions use of a local guide and what their impression were of the one they used. The alternative is the do a web search on each name in the list you have and see if any of them get good recommendations from people who have birded with them.

Niels

Hi melisande,

I would look at trip reports at cloudbirders website and see what guides people recoomend.

Birdingpal is in my experience hit and miss affair - many people don't respond, one friendly man was not a birdwatcher but thought that birders might want to stay in his pension etc.

lost

anybody know how to contact birding pal gave their 10 bps donation and got an error message --no reply to emails --about to have to give up on the concept

Thanks!

After seeing (in the second response) that the main problem with BirdingPal is lack of response and expertise rather than security, I just went ahead and contacted almost everyone on the list. I didn't realize this the first time through, but most are only available on the weekend anyway.


Hopefully, I will get some responses.

jurek said:

Hi melisande, [...]
Birdingpal is in my experience hit and miss affair - many people don't respond, one friendly man was not a birdwatcher but thought that birders might want to stay in his pension etc.

Click to expand...

You should contact the person responsible for the website/listing in such case and report it. Such people are deleted immedialy!
I reported a guy from Poland who changed his will to help without any fee and choosed to run a bussines instead.

Welcome melisande at Birdforum!

You wrote "It feels strange to make arrangement to meet some entirely unknown Indian man and go birding with him." but in this sentence is nothing referring to birdingpals.
On the other hand if you´re hiring and paying a foreign bird guide from another country I doubt you´re familar with him and there is any guarantee that you will be satisfied either.

Regards,
Roman
(Birdingpal)

Ps: From a trip of mine:
http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=63871&highlight=neusiedler+see+birding

Or ask "vijay0828" about his experiences with myself ;-)

We're back from our trip to Hyderabad, India. My husband and I did in the end opt to go out with a couple birdingpals who were kind enough to make room for us in their busy schedules. Overall, we'd rate the birdingpal experience about 8 on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high). It was definitely much, much better than trying to bird the city by ourselves.

Our first guide was the best -- I'd say 9.5/10 -- really good. He took us to a place that he had birded almost everyday for a number of years (Hyderabad Central University) and to which we would not have otherwise had access (since we didn't have pass). He could easily ID every bird we saw to species, knew exactly how interesting each bird was, knew how to get us on the bird, seemed to have an intense love of nature, was very nice and patient, was a good teacher. Instead of simply telling us what we were going to see, he would just take us to the next spot and we'd all start looking around. Sometimes he'd let us find some birds and call them/figure them out first.

Anyway, this 1st outing went on for over 6 hours and we wound up with 68 species. (Not bad for a park in the middle of a very congested city in the middle of the summer!) These species included: Gray Francolin; Indian Nightjar (seen); Spotted Owlet (seen); White-breasted Waterhen (seen); Cinnamon Bittern; Egyptian Vulture (rare for the area); Red-collared Dove; Gray-bellied Cuckoo; Black-headed Cuckoo-Shrike; Common Iora; an entire family of Rufous Treepies (parents feeding chicks); Tawny-bellied Babbler; Yellow-eyed Babbler; Yellow-billed Babbler, Tickell's Blue Flycatcher, etc.

Our second guide (who took us to a different hotspot) was just as nice, but didn't seen to be nearly as good with the IDs -- particularly the LBJs. In fact, he didn't even seem interested. At one point, we both had to beg him to stop so we could get out and have a look at what turned out to be a family of Ashy-crowned Lark Sparrows. On the other hand, the bird that he was hurry to show us (and that we eventually did see) was also awesome -- an Indian Eagle Owl.

So, again, all in all, it was a terrific experience. We wound up with 74 life birds in a total of 4 outings. And in retrospect, I feel a little silly for worrying about social dangers. True, my husband wound up coming along on most of the outings, but I'm sure I would have felt fine alone (as I did, in fact, on one occasion).

Thanks all!

That´s good news, melisande!
I´m glad that you didn´t get disappointed, we birdingpals do what we can.
Hopefully I ´ll have a similar good birding in Florida (10 days to go)
;-)