7 of the Best Birdwatching Travel Destinations Around the World

Travelers might plan their next adventure around all manner of things: a buzzy chef, a sports event, an art exhibition, a single gorgeous panoramic view… Would it be so absurd to plan a trip around a bird? As Margaux Anbouba previously reported, there’s been a notable rise in interest among millennials and Gen Z over the past few years, with recent studies finding that people who engage in birdwatching have improved brain function and mental health. So much so that, for Vogue’s November issue, we ventured up to Bar Harbor, Maine, to capture some of the season’s best high-fashion looks that also double as perfect birdwatching gear, accompanied by ornithologist Michael Good.

Want to try it for yourself? Here, find seven destination ideas that take more itinerary inspiration from the Merlin app than they do from the Michelin guide.

Mediterranean Europe

Greater Flamingos in Noto, Sicily

Naturalist Andrea Corso is hauling his Leica scope through the blazing heat along the trails of Sicily’s Vendicari Nature Reserve. “Merlin gets so many birds wrong,” he says, as he catches me trying to Sound-ID the chittering of a Sardinian Warbler in the reeds. One of Italy’s preeminent experts in raptors and in dragonflies, he drove an hour from his home in Siracusa to meet us on the side of the road this morning at the entrance to this national park ringed by coastal ruins and Roman salt ponds. This is the last landfall on Sicily before Tunisia: The brackish lagoons are a fuel stop for birds crossing between Europe and Africa, making for a constantly rotating avian cast. Corso sets up in the blind and points the scope across the water at a neon-pink bouquet of Greater Flamingos ballet-dancing along the far edge of the lagoon, while grebes dive, avocets wade, and egrets and herons hunt in the foreground.

We’ve seen flamingos elsewhere in the Mediterranean, including in the Camargue, outside of Avignon. But in Sicily, an adventure to spot a flamingo also brings an outdoorsy edge to a few days of Baroque villages and beach time, while introducing us to an underexplored stretch of coastline—not to mention these holes in the rocky coast where, Corso tells us, archaeologists think the Romans used to torture prisoners of war with carnivorous eels.

Sicily is marvelous for birdlife, not just because trans-Mediterranean migrants regularly pass through. We’re staying just five miles from the reserve, where a hotelier couple reimagined the historic former estate of Prince Nicolaci in the UNESCO-protected region of Val di Noto and built Il San Corrado di Noto, with its neat white rows of suites and brand new villas tucked among citrus and olive groves with two scenic saltwater pools. Inland from here, the Iblean Plateau and the forests around Sortino are home to whole other sets of species, owls included. And at dusk in Noto over the clinking of glasses at sidewalk trattorias, crepuscular birds—two species of swift—swoop and spiral by the hundreds.

Central America

Three-wattled Bellbirds in Monteverde, Costa Rica

Across two rainy August mornings in a private nature reserve called Curi-Cancha, in the cloud forests of Monteverde, I meet a steady procession of tourists who’ve shown up seeking a glimpse of Costa Rica’s most photographed bird: the Resplendent Quetzal. But while they search, they’re getting the full picture, as Costa Rica is full of bird-world celebrities. Keel-billed Toucans—the rainbow-billed “cereal box” species—hop through the canopy overhead. We’re just up the coast from the world’s last stronghold of the Scarlet Macaw. Exclusively Costa Rican hummingbird species zip through the gardens. But the unexpected showstopper here? It turns out to be a brown and white weirdo: a bird that boasts one of the loudest calls on Earth. Cutting through the forest soundscape is the mesmerizingly bizarre, 100-decibel call of the Three-wattled Bellbird. The male, with his three black tentacular wattles dangling from the base of his beak, opens his mouth so wide he looks like the stuff of a horror movie as he spits out a series of mechanical screeches and metallic bonks.

Andrés Valverde, who manages experiences at another Monteverde reserve called Savia, says his goal is to help travelers move “away from checklists”—or to stop obsessing about the things they think they should see—and embrace the practice of “observation as art,” letting the sensations of the forest in, and resisting the urge to label and catalog. This kind of paying attention, he says, has therapeutic power. Savia is a project of the nearby Hotel Belmar, the family-run eco-lodge which has brought nature lovers from abroad to this mountainside since the 1980s, practicing sustainable tourism, regenerative farming, and farm-to-table dining well before the hospitality industry had a full terminology for these concepts. Two-thirds of the nine-acre property is cloud forest, and on a rainy day or a relaxing afternoon, one can pay attention to the resident parakeets from the balcony of the juice bar or marvel at a motmot from the villa’s private plunge pool.

East Africa

Lilac-breasted Rollers in Tsavo West National Park, Kenya

Everyone who can go on an African safari should go on an African safari—it’s a trip with an incredible power to recalibrate one’s perspective. But there are multiple kinds of safari-goers. My husband and I realized quickly we were different. We weren’t seeing eye to eye with the big cat photography buffs: Lions came and went, but we nearly jumped out of the Jeep the one time we saw a Secretarybird, and we would’ve been contented to spend 45 minutes sitting under an acacia tree watching a giant Verreaux's eagle-owl bat its freaky pink eyelids.

Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park gives you permission to embrace being this other kind: Its diversity of ecosystems means travelers need not spend the entirety of their time inside a vehicle. Hikes up to volcano calderas and cloud-capped green mountains, drives through forests and along centuries-old lava flows, all offer a chance to see more than 500 bird species. Almost certainly, expect to spot the showy Lilac-breasted Roller, perching patiently on a low branch, ready for its close-up, flaunting its stunning colors, including chartreuse, gold, turquoise, sapphire, and a vivid lilac.

At the woman-owned, Kenyan-owned, classic camp Finch Hattons, with its open-air restaurant, tented suites, and a bar fit for Hemingway, enjoy the view from the breakfast table of a spring-fed pool where monkeys frolic, hippos loll, and the surrounding trees are abuzz with dozens of lemon-yellow weaver birds clinging to their hanging nests. Still owned and run by the family who bought and rewilded the property in the early 1990s, the Gehlots, Finch Hattons recently joined Virgin Limited Edition, so while it feels like stepping back in time in some ways, it has every modern amenity in others, including binoculars and a birding field guide awaiting you in your tent. Resident birding experts host sunrise walks—be ready to rise early and get on the road in pitch dark—into the nearby Chyulu Hills cloud forest.

Ecuador

Waved Albatrosses in the Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands are, as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau put it, a “last sanctuary of natural life.” Naturalists from Charles Darwin to David Attenborough have built up the image of this Pacific archipelago as a “bucket list” nature destination. And all its islands—19 major ones, 127 in total—have their own unique species. Take the southern island of Española: more or less the only known place on Earth where the critically endangered Waved albatross—gigantic, gangly, and gull-like—nests. Perhaps you’ve seen nature show footage of their outrageous courtship dance, clattering their sunshine-yellow beaks together in a protracted, percussive, highly choreographed fencing match. On the same island, blue-footed and Nazca boobies nest right beside the walking trails.

Delicate as these ecosystems are, there are a fast-growing number of options for reaching and exploring them, and choosing a light-footprint operator is key. Ecoventura, established by a family of Ecuadorian conservationists and now owned by Abercrombie & Kent, is known for having set the standard. Widely respected as a pioneer in responsible tourism, the Dunn family entered the space in 1991, and today their three small yachts—just 10 cabins each—are like boutique hotels at sea, with Relais & Châteaux’s stamp of approval. This year, they launched a new birding and photography departure, co-hosted by a National Geographic Society nature photographer. Seven-day itineraries are stubbornly unhurried, timed around the intersections of sunlight and wildlife routines.

The Pacific Northwest

Black Oystercatchers in Tofino, British Columbia

Every spring, the mudflats of Vancouver Island’s Esowista Peninsula host Western Sandpipers by the tens of thousands. These tiny, fluffy shorebirds—from a bird family known as peeps—touch down here on their way from South and Central America to the Arctic. And they are in good company when they do: More than 40 shorebird species use this coast of mudflats, rainforest, sand beaches and rocky shorelines, including the largest migratory concentrations of whimbrels in British Columbia. But if you visit outside these precious few weeks of spring, vast networks of trails along beaches and through rainforests offer a menagerie of epiphytes and birdlife all year round. A personal favorite: the handsome Black Oystercatcher, with its deep-orange beak and eyes to match. You might spot them through the surf spray on the massive rocks beneath the restaurant windows of The Pointe at the Wickaninnish Inn.

On its private stretch of Chesterman Beach, this family-owned, Relais & Chateaux port in a storm is a couple miles from the charming bustle of surf town Tofino—and, if it weren’t so incredible to hike Pacific Rim National Park, it’s the kind of place you’d enjoy never leaving. There’s head-to-toe Helly Hansen rain gear in every closet and a fireplace in every room to make the spring climes of the Pacific Northwest feel less daunting.

The Caribbean

Doctor Birds in St. Mary, Jamaica

In the tropics, birdlife is a given. But some island getaways offer more to the bird-curious than others. Writer Ian Fleming was a devoted birder. He wrote all 14 of his James Bond books in a Jamaican oceanfront bungalow, which he named GoldenEye. He chose the name for his dashing protagonist off his bookshelf, borrowing it from the cover of “Birds of the West Indies”—a field guide authored by the American ornithologist James Bond. GoldenEye proved the perfect outpost for a bird-lover’s retreat: More than 300 species of bird visit or make their homes on the Connecticut-sized island over the course of a year, and one in every 10 of those are endemic species, meaning species that don’t exist in the wild anywhere else but here.

The national bird, the Red-billed streamertail, is one of these exclusive-to-Jamaica sightings: The male of this hummingbird species sports a pair of inches-long black streamers that trail behind his tiny, iridescent body as he zips about like the physicians’ tailcoats of yore. This earned it the local nickname, the Doctor Bird. One place to see it: flying flower to flower in the lush, tropical gardens at Fleming’s estate, now the celebrity-magnet GoldenEye resort, owned by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell since 1976.

Fleming’s own bungalow is the heart of what is now a 52-acre resort, with beach huts, cottages, and villas, still true to the original “barefoot-Jamaican” vernacular with its jalousie shutters, hardwood floors, outdoor showers, and tropical gardens. The property is hosting twice-per-week nature walks for guests on the GoldenEye grounds, birds included, to mark this year’s 80th anniversary of Fleming’s 1946 construction of the original house.

The UK

Red-throated Loons in the Scottish Highlands

In the Scottish Highland counties of Caithness and Sutherland, a blanket bog has been unfurling over the landscape for some nine millennia. For roadtrippers on Scotland’s 500-mile North Coast 500 loop, it’s eye candy on an inland detour. For someone who’d go off the beaten track to spot a new bird, this UNESCO-protected ecosystemic oddity is a destination in its own right. Red-throated and Black-throated loons—two kinds of sleek diving birds with their iconic, haunting calls that most people have heard only in film scores—nest in the peatland’s inland lochs. Shorebirds feed at the lochs’ edges, and upland raptors soar over the moors. And back up on the northern coast, it could be possible to catch a glimpse of the great crowdpleasers of the northern seas: puffins. While more plentiful on Iceland’s Westman Islands or in Newfoundland’s Witless Bay, small colonies might be just a winding, scenic drive and a stroll away. Stop for an overnight near the remote Loch Hope, at the seven-bedroom 1870s hunting lodge on a 100,000-acre estate, reimagined as stylish conservation resort Hope by WildLand just this year.