Exotic Birding offers two types of tours to Central and South America, birding tours and bird/wildlife nature photo tours.
Our birding tours and photo tours are all led by an expert birding guide and an accomplished bird photographer, but they differ in emphasis. Our birding tours are for devoted birders of any skill level seeking to maximize species count. Our bird/wildlife photo tours are slower paced, emphasize photography rather than species count, and are intended for bird/wildlife photography enthusiasts.
To access the extensive information about our tours and destinations, please click the blue links on the sidebar or the tabs above. Feel free to call us any time. We provide personalized service and won't subject you to a phone menu or sales pitch when you call.
We're happy to provide participants with a CD of photos taken by our tour leader, Laura Fellows, during each tour upon request. We encourage you to visit our galleries of full-size images taken by Laura on prior tours.
Interested persons should register as early as possible to ensure a place on the tour. Deposits are refundable until 90 days prior to tour departure. To register print the registration form accessed by clicking the sidebar link and mail it to us with your deposit.
EXOTIC BIRDING TOURS
We've carefully planned every birding tour to maximize our birding success by visiting as many habitats, altitudinal zones, and locales as possible while still maintaining a reasonable tour pace. Each tour is led by an English-speaking master birding guide who usually lives and guides in the destination country year-round. Accommodations are generally comfortable eco-lodges or hotels situated near birding locales unless otherwise noted on our tour pages.
We offer Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama birding tours every year because these are our most popular destinations. In addition, we offer birding tours to Belize most years, and birding tours to Brazil, Guyana, Peru, and the Galapagos Islands some years. We're offering a birding tour to Guyana in March 2010 and will be offering a similar tour in March 2011. We expect to offer birding tours to Machu Picchu and Tambopata lowlands of Peru in August 2011 and to the SE Atlantic Forests of Brazil in September 2011. We may offer a birding/photo tour to the Galapagos Islands in May or June 2011 depending on travel demand. TOP
EXOTIC BIRD/WILDLIFE NATURE PHOTO TOURS
Our bird/wildlife photo tours are designed for photographers interested in making photographs of a broad diversity of tropical birds. We photograph hummingbirds visiting feeders, hawks and eagles in open habitats, and a wide variety of toucans, antbirds, tanagers, and other birds within rainforests and other habitats. While our emphasis is bird photography, we also photograph caimans, tamanduas, monkeys, and other wildlife as opportunities arise. Participants need not be birders to enjoy these tours. Our photo tours are also suitable for beginning birders or birders interested in a more relaxed tour pace than traditional birding tours.
All our photo tours are led by an expert bird/naturalist guide who can find and identify birds and wildlife in conjunction with a professional photographer, Laura Fellows, who is skilled at adjusting to the often variable lighting conditions found within tropical forests. Our guides ensure that we see a wide variety of birds and identify them for us. Our photography leader works with the guide and handles all logistics to ensure that every tour is a success. She is also available to assist participants with their photography upon request.
Our photo tours are unique in that they are conducted similarly to our birding tours but emphasize photography rather than species count. We walk rainforest trails, take boat trips through remote wetlands, and visit many altitudinal zones and out-of-the-way places in pursuit of diverse, colorful, majestic, unusual, and secretive tropical birds and wildlife to photograph. All the while, we stay in comfortable ecolodges and hotels throughout our tours.
We began offering photo tours because we found that photographing birds on traditional birding tours conflicts with the goals and interests of birders seeking to maximize species count. We also wanted to offer something more than traditional bird/wildlife nature photo tours and workshops that specialize on techniques for photographing a single group of birds such as hummingbirds or are mainly devoted to photographing larger, relatively stationary birds and wildlife in open habitats. The goal of our photo tours is to photograph the entire spectrum of birdlife in the tropics, encompassing everything from hummingbirds and aquatic birds to secretive denizens of the forest understory.
We offer bird/wildlife photo tours to Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama every year. We may offer a photo tour to the Galapagos Islands in May or June 2011 depending on travel demand. For more information about our upcoming tours, plesae contact us by phone or email. TOP
