subject: Bird Watching Holidays Breaks With A Difference [print this page] A twitcher (a pro slang for the amateur bird watching enthusiast) never misses an opportunity to get a few more bird sightings under his or her belt. So when holiday time comes around, it seems foolish for him or her not to take advantage of the well earned break to get a bit more serious. There are adventure sports holidays in this modern world; there are night clubbing holidays; there are ski-ing holidays; snowboarding holidays; even walking holidays (as if people didnt do enough walking as it is). Well, for the amateur bird spotter, there are also bird watching holidays: and they offer a chance to visit some of the most incredible places on earth, in the company of fellow enthusiasts.
The best birding holidays are led by experts, usually experts placed by residency or long experience in the country of destination. An expert will provide hassle-free guidance to all the best birding spots in an area, often enabling holidaying bird watchers to catch glimpses of birds they would never have found on their own and in situations they could only have dreamed about, were to try and conduct their own bird watching trip. Take the excellent Limosa as an example a birding holiday company run out of the UK, whose tentacles reach as far as Southeast Asia, as low as the Serengeti and as high as the Canadian Rockies. Wherever there are birds, Limosa run tours (even in the Arctic, should a person fancy catching a sighting of the Snowy Owl in its home territory) and they run them all by employing either native guides or seasoned experts. Where native guides are used, the bird watching possibilities become tantalising even to an occasional twitcher: people who live in and around indigenous bird areas can be so adept at silently hunting down the rarest of species that people who go on these tours often have better luck than the most skilled television crew. There are, for example, species of bird so shy that even casual locals have never seen them. The guides employed by companies like Limosa, on the other hand, spend their lives with and around these species: they know what to look for, when to look for it and how to approach the bird once it has been identified.
Even non bird watchers get a kick out of these holidays. Theyre different, for one thing theres a point to them, a thing to find and watch, which is where a lot of other holidays can fall down a little. Going on a bird watching holiday implies giving oneself a purpose, while one is on vacation and that negates the twin possibilities of boredom or not knowing what to do. Then, of course, theres the locations themselves which, covering the kinds of places birds go rather than people, are uniformly stunning. Anyone looking to embark on a holiday that offers a bit more than catered meals and a resort swimming pool could do a lot worse than trying out a little part time twitching.
