The Birds

Now, where can I see a lilac-breasted roller…?

"Ah, grasshopper..."

When people ask me if I photograph birds, I say, “Yes, of course—if there aren’t any animals around…!” Having said that, I almost always see more birds than animals on my trips, and they’re almost always more active and more colourful. In fact, they account for 27 of my Top 100 photos.

If you’re a bird-watcher (or ‘birder’), let’s take a look at what each continent has to offer…

Africa

Fly Bee

Nearly two-thirds of my photographic trips have been to Africa, and I’ve visited nine different countries:

• Botswana (Okavango Delta, Moremi and Chobe)

• Kenya (Laikipia, Masai Mara, Ol Jogi, Olare Motorogi and Naboisho Conservancies)

• Namibia (Gabus Game Ranch and Etosha)

• Rwanda (Volcanoes National Park)

• South Africa (Kruger and Greater Kruger)

• Tanzania (Grumeti, Klein’s Camp, Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro, Serengeti, Tarangire)

• Uganda (passing through…)

• Zambia (South Luangwa)

• Zimbabwe (Hwange, Mana Pools)

During my 21 trips to Africa, I’ve seen 464 different species of birds. Here are the top 10 and the number of places where I’ve seen them. (NB: I sometimes went to more than one country, so the totals can be more than the 21 individual ‘trips’.)

• Ring-necked dove 27

• Lilac-breasted roller 27

• African fish eagle 26

• Helmeted guineafowl 26

• Egyptian goose 25

• Little bee-eater 24

• Fork-tailed drongo 21

• Grey heron 20

• Bateleur 20

• Martial eagle 19

Those figures suggest you’re pretty much guaranteed to see some species, but even then, it depends on where you go. I generally visit national parks (owned by the Government), reserves (run by regional government) and private concessions and conservancies (usually owned by the local tribes and leased to safari camps and lodges).

Here’s a list of my favourite birds and the best places to see them:

• Lilac-breasted roller: Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

• Little, European and swallow-tailed bee-eaters: Chobe National Park, Botswana, and Masai Mara, Kenya

• African fish eagles: Chobe National Park, Botswana, and South Luangwa National Park, Zambia

Antarctica

Eddie the Penguin

Antarctica is a fantastic place to see penguins, but you don’t get the variety of wildlife that you find in Africa. Overall, I’ve only seen 67 bird species down there, which is obviously far fewer than in Africa. However, I’ve only cruised the Southern Ocean twice, and the lack of different species is more than made up for by the quantity of marine life.

My main reason for going to Antarctica was to see the penguins, but I’ve also spotted plenty of other seabirds. Here are the top 10:

• Southern giant petrel

• Sooty shearwater

• Snowy sheathbill

• Wandering albatross

• Chinstrap penguin

• Kelp gull

• Grey-headed albatross

• Adélie penguin

• Brown skua

• Antarctic petrel

There are three main places to visit in Antarctica: the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. The best way to get there is by ship from Ushuaia, Argentina, and then by Zodiac inflatable boat for twice-daily cruises and landings. Some itineraries take in all three destinations, and some just go to the Peninsula. I visited all three in 2016 and went back to the Peninsula in 2021.

Once you’re on board, you have no control over the itinerary, so you need to check in advance where the planned landings are. If you go on deck, you see seabirds almost all the time and the odd whale, but these are the main landing points for penguins and albatrosses:

• Falkland Islands

  • Saunders Island for two king penguin rookeries and an albatross nesting site

  • West Point Island for rockhopper penguins and a colony of black-browed albatrosses

  • Gypsy Bay for Magellanic penguins

• South Georgia

  • Prion Island for wandering albatrosses

  • Salisbury Plain for king penguins

  • St Andrew's Bay for 150,000 breeding pairs of king penguins—the largest rookery in the world!

  • Gold Harbour for penguins

• Antarctic Peninsula

  • Orne Harbour for chinstrap and gentoo penguins

  • Cuverville Island for chinstrap and gentoo penguins

  • Danco Island for gentoo penguins

  • Neko Harbour for gentoo penguins

If you don’t have much of a budget, you can sometimes get a very good deal on cruises to the Peninsula, but then you’d miss out on the real star of the show, South Georgia, where you can see 60,000 king penguins on Salisbury Plain and 150,000 breeding pairs in St Andrew's Bay!

Asia

A Watchful Eye

Apart from a day trip to Can Gio in Vietnam, the only Asian country I’ve visited on photographic trips is India, and the problem with India is that it’s all about the tiger! If you see an Indian roller on a game drive, your guide will drive straight past—because it’s not a tiger! That can be VERY frustrating…

I’ve seen 73 different birds in Asia. Here are the top 10:

• Indian roller

• Crested serpent eagle

• Red-wattled lapwing

• Spotted owlet

• Spotted dove

• Lesser whistling duck

• Little cormorant

• Rufous treepie

• Lesser adjutant stork

• Junglefowl

My favourite is the India roller, which is a less colourful version of the lilac-breasted roller. However, there are plenty of eagles and other birds if you can persuade your driver to let you stop and take pictures!

Europe

Little Brown Job

I very rarely go to European countries to photograph wildlife, but I spent a week in Svalbard and a couple of long weekends at a safari park in Cabárceno, Spain, and Lake Kerkini, Greece.

Overall, I’ve seen 29 bird species in Europe, and these are the top 10:

• Red kite

• Pink-footed goose

• Rock ptarmigan

• Little auk

• Purple sandpiper

• Long-tailed duck

• Red-throated diver

• Northern fulmar

• Snow bunting

Svalbard cruises are designed for people who want to see polar bears, but there are still plenty of birds to see. As with Antarctic cruises, you don’t choose where to go. There’s only one set of islands, and the route is obviously up to the guide and the captain of the ship, so you can relax until there’s a sighting.

My most intense birding experience came when Paul Goldstein introduced us all to the slow pan as a way of broadening our horizons and getting better pictures, but it was a very tricky skill to master.

You had to select a slow shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/60 of a second and then follow a bird in the viewfinder, taking pictures as it flew past.

The benefit of the slow shutter speed was that the wings blurred to give a sense of motion while the background blurred in interesting and attractive ways—allegedly!

The problem was my low hit rate. I took 1,504 photos one afternoon in a Zodiac using the slow pan, and I only kept two!

As Paul admitted, “A slow pan doesn’t demand anything from your camera, but it demands an awful lot from you.”

North America

Gulled

I’ve spent a lot of time in the States over the years, but I’ve only been on three wildlife photography trips: once to Glacier, Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, once to Nunavut and once to Alaska. Given the paucity of trips, I’ve only seen seven different birds in North America:

• Snowy owl

• Snow bunting

• Osprey

• Red-throated merganser

• Bald eagle

• Crow

• King eider

South America

View fullsize

"Who's the bird with the long neck?"

Apart from Antarctica, South America was the last continent I managed to visit, and even now, I’ve only been to the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, the Pantanal in Brazil and Torres del Paine in Chile.

Overall, I’ve seen 142 bird species in South America. The most spectacular bird I saw was the hyacinth macaw, but these are the top 10 species:

• Southern crested caracara

• Striated heron

• Neotropic cormorant

• Southern lapwing

• Yellow-billed tern

• Toco toucan

• Snowy sheathbill

• Little blue heron

• White woodpecker

• Little cuckoo

Verdict

Dust Bird

I usually book photographic trips to see animals rather than birds, but there have been exceptions. I went to Lake Kerkini in Greece to see the Dalmatian pelicans, and I went to the Antarctic (twice!) to see the penguins. And even if I’m notionally there to photograph animals, there are still plenty of occasions when I’ll stop to take pictures of a beautiful bird taking off.

My favourite birds are eagles, rollers, bee-eaters and kingfishers. I’ve been lucky enough to see hundreds of them in various African countries, but my favourite birding haunts are probably Chobe National Park in Botswana, South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and Lake Kerkini in Greece.

Over to you…

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