Bonaire is not one of the more common ports offered on Caribbean cruises but it’s well worth the effort. Echo Bonaire has several tour options. If you are in Bonaire on a land based visit, try their weekly tour.
Tours take place at Echo’s Conservation Centre, Kunuku Dos Pos, a 30-minute drive from Kralendijk town centre, every Wednesday afternoon at 4.30 p.m. No booking is necessary. Groups meet at the windmill on Dos Pos. Led by a guide, the tours are friendly, interactive, and fun and last from one hour to an hour and a half, depending on how many questions there are.
If you are on a cruise ship, then you need a private tour arranged well in advance as their internet availability is sporadic.
Private tours are also available! We recommend early in the morning at 7.30 a.m., when the birds are most active and likely to be seen, or in the afternoon at 4.30 p.m. if you’re looking for a great way to wind down your day.
Private tours are $25 per person for a minimum of two people.
See the highly endangered Yellow-shouldered Parrot and help a worthy cause at the same time!
CN Traveler came out with this list of “Trips of a Lifetime” and I was pleased to see a very strong trend toward eco-tourism experiences. Botswana, Brazil, Ecuador (my trip for next year) are all featured here. Just when you think you are a niche travel group!
If you don’t live in an area that has hummingbirds and you want a quick fix here’s the perfect reality tv show! Watch a live web cam in West Texas as various hummingbird species visit the feeders!
Now that you know how to use miles to get to Australia and use Brisbane as a gateway city, what you really want to know is how to get out in the bush where the birds are! Fortunately, Australia is an amazingly easy country to travel around in. It’s safe, everyone speaks English and the tourism infrastructure is excellent! All you need is a well-researched plan and a car to get there.
MAKE YOUR PLAN
1. Determine what species of birds you want to see. Bear in mind that no matter what species you are targeting, you will find many other species in the same location. In my case, although I was really keen to see wild Parrots, I was very happy to see that other species such as Fairy-wrens and Bowerbirds were also within reach.
2. Use guide books such as “Parrots of the World” by Joseph Forshaw and “The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia” by Graham Pizzey & Frank Knight to determine where these species can most easily be found. These books have maps to help you formulate an itinerary. Although I prefer Kindle/eBooks for casual reading, with a field guide you really need the hard copy to be able to compare the birds you see to the images in the book. Don’t worry if you don’t know all the species. As long as you get a decent photo, you can always look them up! You can buy these books on Amazon.com if you don’t have them already.
3. Use other internet resources to find out where the birds have been seen most recently. These may be Facebook or Twitter contacts, blogs like Miles to the Wild or trip reports on Surfbirds. Google the scientific name of the bird + “report”. For example if you Google “Lophochroa leadbeateri sightings” you get this. If you have destinations in mind from researching the field guides, you can get better results by Googling “Lophochroa leadbeateri Bowra” such as this.
4. Do an eBird search on the species to see where other people have reported them. Here’s an example of “eBird Major Mitchell Cockatoo“. You can then click on the hotspot information to see what other species are found there. This will help you allocate how many days you want to spend there. Spend more time if the destination has more of the species you are targeting. From the above search, I zoomed in on Bowra Station and can see an impressive 224 species reported so I would want to spend at least a few days there!
This step can be very time consuming as you need to research each species you want to see individually but it is well worth it as you will save lots of time once you are traveling and you can travel independently which saves you lots of money and gives you more choices as to when, where & how you want your birding adventure to happen!
5. EBird is integrated with Google maps so you can click on the hotspot (using Bowra Station as an example) and find out how far it is from you. In this case, it’s in the bush so Google maps can’t find it exactly so I used the nearest town which is Cunnamulla to learn that it would be over 9 hours drive from Brisbane. I’ve done it in one day but it’s a VERY long day! You also need to make sure you arrive well before dusk to avoid adding to the roo road kill on the roadside!
I recommend breaking the journey at Lake Coolmunda on the outbound and Stanthorpe on the return. See my road trip post for more details. As we go through the SEQ (South-east QLD series, I will give more details about each location.
So there is a very basic idea of how to plan your itinerary. Next, you will need a car, accommodation and a budget so stay tuned!
I’ve been using Lonely Planet for over 30 years to help me plan my travels. In the 80’s it was the “Shoestring” guidebooks, in the 90’s their first online Thorntree was born and now into the 2000’s they have streamlined the once heavy guidebooks into downloadable pages and have a great little weekly newsletter that I subscribe to. I am really pleased to see them address eco-tourism and how to go about it in a responsible manner. This is something I talk about often but I have no where near the reach Lonely Planet does!
Birdwatchers and other species of traveller with a passion for watching wildlife are a breed apart. Millions of them migrate across the globe every year in the hope of a sighting, spending serious money as they go.
The thrill of seeing an animal, however fleetingly, in its natural habitat has turned wildlife tourism into a multi-billion dollar division of the travel industry.
We knew we were on the cusp of the rainy season although we had been pretty lucky so far. This time the luck ran out. After a successful birding excursion to Taiping Lake Gardens and an afternoon siesta praying the rain would let up it finally did for a bit. I grabbed my camera and a plastic bag to keep it dry and braved the grounds despite the still threatening clouds overhead. The grounds of Sentosa Villa are quite extensive and potentially very birdy. I had to stick near the shelters to stay as dry as possible as bursts of rain drove me undercover. Below are the only shots I was able to get, ironically the best one is the dancing chicken! The Racquet-tailed Drongo showed very nicely as well. There were some monkeys running around to keep me amused while I waited under the shelters for the rain to let up so I could dash on to the next one. I finally gave up after an hour and went back to the room.
Now that the Mother of all African Adventures is behind us, it seems my fascination with Africa isn’t over yet! So what would I do for an encore? If you’ve been reading this blog for the past several months, hopefully you enjoyed hearing how I planned the travel to South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, Ghana & Tanzania and saw most of my target birds. But there is still so much more to see!
So what would be on my list if I do a “Godmother” of all African Adventures? Here are a few places on my radar.
Namibia – Peach-faced Lovebirds, Ruppells Parrots & more. This would be a self-drive trip.
Zambia/Botswana/Zimbabwe/Malawi – would choose the best of these for Brown-necked Parrots, Lillian’s Lovebirds, Black-cheeked Lovebirds, Meyers Parrots & more. Most of these places might require using the car/driver option which is not my preferred method so I would be looking hard for national parks I can get to with public transport & taxis. So far, these are looking like the most expensive for lodges so I need to do the most research here.
Ethiopia – the layover wasn’t enough, I’d like to get to Menagesha NP for Yellow-faced Parrots, Black-winged Lovebirds & more. Easy day trip from Addis Ababa or spend one night there.
Uganda – I think my odds for African Grey Parrots are better here than in Ghana. I’d use public transport to Fort Portal, then a taxi to Kibale.
WHAT DO I NEED?
Short answer – United miles as Star Alliance is by far the best alliance for Africa. I could supplement with some Avios to get from Namibia to Livingstone, Zambia via JNB. So looks like Chase will be my best friend for a while longer!
Since I am an even worse videographer than photographer, I thought I would share this video posted on YouTube by Rigdon Currie. He and his family visit several of the same places we did in northern Tanzania with Rockjumper Birding Tours and they spent more time in each place. He got some great footage that really shows what it’s like to travel in the African bush. They even got to do a hot-air balloon ride – I’m so jealous! As for the birds, I’m sure they got more than we did but they stayed longer. I did see a lot of familiar birds though so I think we did OK too! So jealous of the leopards!
We were given a pick-up time of 9:30am which pretty much killed any hope of going anywhere for birding so we had to do the best we could at the hotel. Lucky for us the Addis Ababa Hilton has vast grounds with lots of birds! We were up at 6am and birded for a couple hours. Here are some of the birds and a nice look at the grounds of the Hilton.
I did my best to match them up with pics in the bird book – Birds of Africa South of the Sahara 2nd Edition by Ian Sinclair & Peter Ryan.
African Mourning Doves
Heuglin’s Wheatear
Hilton Swimming Pool
Dusky Turtle Dove
Typical arched hall linking the various wings of the Hilton
I’d really like to get this Sunbird right. I’m struggling to find one with the iridescent green head, purple breast, cream belly and yellow patch on the wing but without a red collar! If anyone can help, please comment!
So far the most likely suspects are Violet-breasted Sunbird, White-bellied Sunbird, Oustalet’s Sunbird, Amani Sunbird, Eastern Violet-backed Sunbird or Variable Sunbird. Any of these birds’s pics in the bird book are close but none are spot on.
Some kind of Bulbul?
Who’s hiding in there?
A little Speckled Mousebird!
While we only saw a few birds, considering this is just 2 hours in a major hotel in the capital city, I’d say Ethiopia is worth a 2nd visit someday to see more birds!
Yesterday I blogged about how to visit the Kakum National Park in Ghana. Now lets see some of the birds!
Firstly, we actually SAW a lot more than I could get photos of. These birds are camera shy and they are fast! The few bird pics I got are terrible to the point that I can’t match them to a pic in the bird book other than the red bird (Red-headed Malimbe) and the blue bird (Splendid Glossy Starling). I will try to make up for it with photos of the actual canopy walkway.
Pied Crow
Cattle Egret
The trail leading up to the canopy walkway, see how dark it is? We saw a Paradise Flycatcher along the way but the photo didn’t come out – too dark.
These are our guides. Only one was the real paid guide, the other one was his friend who just tagged along, I think he is in training.
Some independent birders already there.
The organized birding group who are also staying at the Rainforest Lodge. I noticed they were watching something very intently so I followed their gaze but couldn’t see anything. All of a sudden, a small bird flew out of the foliage very quickly and the group burst into applause. What WAS that bird? We caught up to them and found out it was a Rosy Bee-eater, one of the target birds in Kakum! At least I caught a glimpse of him!
They are really beautiful, check out this video!
Black Bee-eater
Velvet-mantled Drongo
Red-headed Malimbe
At this point my husband is bored and just having fun with the walkways.
Splendid Glossy Starling
See how beautiful he is!
A lizard walking in front of us.
Back at the reception, the shop was finally open.
Our two guides. Sorry I can’t remember their names but they did know the birds quite well so if you see them there, I can recommend them!
Back in the carp park a Little Bee-eater
Lesser Honeyguide
The private bus for the tour group.
While I usually do just fine as an independent birder with a local guide, I have to say that Ghana is the first place where I got real “tour-group envy”. They got into the park much earlier, they have private transport so they can get to more remote places where I couldn’t go using tro-tros and their guide supplies them with a checklist of all the birds they saw.
I did get my guide to thumb through my book with me so I could highlight the birds we saw but I am a long way off from anything that resembles the nicely organized bird list the tour groups get. Here is an example of one for all of Ghana but they do make notes on the exact place the bird was seen.
We had lunch at the small cafe just outside the park and hung around the rest of the day for birding in the car park and surrounding areas. My cash reserves were down (when will I learn to change enough money) so we couldn’t make a second trip into the park, they charge by the hour, not the whole day!
