11th-28th February 2019

This was a pure birding trip to Northern India purchased from the UK company ‘Sunbird Tours’, although all

tours are joint organized together with the American sister company ‘Wings Birding Tours’. The group of nine participants that came from various countries plus our Sunbird/Wings birding guide, assembled in Delhi the day before the trip started. The group was assisted by a local guide/tour escort who accompanied us the whole time, coach driver with helper when travelling between localities or jeep driver and park guide when inside the national parks. The itinerary was well planned and tested earlier to see as many species as possible during the 17 field days we had available and was based at three main localities accessible from Delhi, including Ranthambhore, Bharatpur and Nainital in the Himalayan foothills. Traveling between these localities was by modern coach and sleeper night train although also a longish journey in open jeeps, but within Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve and the Nainital areas was only in three open jeeps. Accommodation varied from luxurious hotels to basic lodges, but always the best available at each site. The tasty Indian food, much of it vegetarian, varied little at the more basic accommodations but was superb and very varied at the best hotels. Our birding guide had excellent birding skills

in finding and identifying the 400+ species we saw on the trip and has guided this tour for many years, but surprisingly, there was minimal personal communication with some participants. Our local guide did an excellent job organizing the ground management making our tour as good as problem free. He also had good birding skills and found several good birds during the tour, but he was not updated for the localities of several rarer species and unfortunately due to this we didn’t see these.

 

Because of hasty birding tempo there was often little time to appreciate all the new species seen, including several of the more interesting ones and little time for discussing subspecies or age and sex of some observations.

This tour it seemed was designed mostly for general birders rather than knowledgeable or experienced ones.

Bird photography was not a priority on this birding tour but as these images show, there was occasionally time to take reasonable images of some species although if too much time was used there was a risk of missing the

next good bird.

​

All in all, a superb birding tour with many new species seen and many photographed, but if bird photography is the prime interest, then the above points should be carefully addressed when considering a birding tour of this type.

​

A selection of mammal images from this trip will be found under Diverse Nature - Mammals.

​

​

​

​

​

.

 

​

11th-28th February 2019