WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide

10/17/2024

Looking for a last minute trip for the coming New Year? These tours are Confirmed to go in January 2025 with space! Check them out on our website here: www.wingsbirds.com

Argentina: The South - Jan 5 - 19
Newfoundland: Winter Birds - Jan 6 - 12
Colombia: The Santa Marta Mountains - Jan 13 - 21
Minnesota in Winter - Jan 16 - 21
Senegal - Jan 30 - Feb 15 (Confirming Soon!)

10/03/2024

WINGS HAS A NEW WEBSITE!
To celebrate over 50 years in the birding tour business, WINGS is proud to unveil our new website. We’ve been hard at work over the past year to create a fresh online experience while preserving familiar aspects of the original WINGS website. Our goal was to keep our clean style, clear tour information, and ease of navigation, formatted for both full screen and mobile devices, and to highlight our true purpose - offering quality birding tours worldwide. We think the results speak for themselves!
We will be continuing improvements in the coming months, with media updates and several exciting (for us at least!) upgrades that will streamline the website experience. We invite you to check it out!

Worldwide birding tour company based in Tucson, Arizona. WINGS Birding Tours has more than 50 years of birdwatching experience and offers travel packages, tour itineraries, and newsletters.

09/29/2024

WINGS Tour Leader, Jake Mohlmann, gives us the Arizona & Utah tour roundup!"
Learn more about this tour by visiting our website here:
https://wingsbirds.com/tours/arizona-utah/

"We just finished another WINGS tour through some of the most scenic parts of the western United States. Northern Arizona, the canyonlands, and Southwestern Utah provided endless vistas. One memorable location was at Bryce Canyon National Park, where the clouds slowly floated over the endless hoodoos of the main amphitheater. With so many amazing places visited, it’s hard to choose a favorite spot. Multiple people voted Antelope Canyon as that location this year. We had a blast exploring the canyonlands and found plenty of birds along the way!"

09/25/2024

Steve Rooke reports from our recently completed Western South Africa tour: It’s hard to pick out the highlights from this year’s tour to Western South Africa. It could be the hordes of Namaqua and Burchell’s Sandgrouse dropping into drink at a Kalahari waterhole, their bubbling calls filling the air. Or the group of 11 Ludwig’s Bustards flapping lazily across a flower-strewn Karoo. And on the subject of flowers, the stunning wildflower displays in Namaqualand and the West Coast National Park must rank as a highlight, especially when we had a fine male Black Harrier drifting over them.

Then there were the normally elusive Protea Canaries that sat still and close for ages, or the mass of Cape Gannets at the Lambert’s Bay colony. Which leads us to the spectacular pelagic out of Cape Town with 7 albatross species and numerous petrels and shearwaters. Getting up close and personal with Cape Rockjumper and Ground Woodpecker was a treat, as was ending the tour wandering around the world-famous Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens – where better than to watch Cape Sugarbirds feeding on flowering proteas.

09/24/2024

From Susan Myers in Borneo - As we've come to expect from Borneo, our journey exceeded all expectations and was nothing short of exceptional.

09/24/2024

Rich Hoyer reports from Peru’s Machu Picchu and the Manu-Kosñipata Road.

09/23/2024

Oli has just returned from our inaugural Spain in Autumn tour! In total we recorded 200 species on our tour, a great number for this time of year.

Highlights included 18 species of birds of prey, plenty of visible migration including thousands of seabirds and even a group of Greater Flamingo migrating over the sea. We also scored a great number of iconic Iberian species including Marbled Duck, White-headed Duck, Great Bustard, Little Bustard, Little Swift, Northern Bald Ibis, Iberian Green Woodpecker, Iberian Grey Shrike, Iberian Magpie, Mediterranean Short-toed Lark, Western Orphean Warbler, and Black Wheatear.

It was also a great tour for rarities with Elegant Tern and Ruppell's Vulture both seen and we also enjoyed multiple Cetacean species on our trip out into the Strait of Gibraltar. Of course we also sampled the finest cuisine in the area all under glorious sunny skies and warm evenings.

Check out the eBird trip report here: https://ebird.org/tripreport/274039

09/10/2024

Now is the time to plan for January! WINGS has a few tours that still have space such as:
Colombia, Argentina, China, Newfoundland, New Mexico, Minnesota, Senegal

See our January Tours calendar here:
https://wingsbirds.com/tours/calendar/
And take your pick as spaces are filling quickly!

08/19/2024

'Tis the Season for juveniles! A miraculously sunny morning broke a string of dripping fog days last week for Steve Howell, who took his camera out into the neighborhood...

08/16/2024

Skye Haas reports from our recent Arizona: Second Spring tour.
We just wrapped up our ever-popular annual southeast Arizona "Second Spring" tour, and by all accounts it was a fantastic success! Set during the monsoon rains of late summer, this period is often thought of as a repeat of spring as the plentiful rains will make the arid browns turn green again, with many plants blooming and several species delaying their breeding cycles to these life-enriching conditions. We tallied in a great haul of birds with 183 species recorded with rarities like Short-tailed Hawk, Rose-throated Becard, Five-striped Sparrow and Thick-billed Kingbird among many other expected SEAZ specialties like Red-faced Warbler, Elegant Trogon, Gray Hawk, Botteri's Sparrow, Varied Bunting, Sulfur-bellied Flycatcher and Painted Redstart. Among the twelve species of hummingbird we saw, White-eared, Beryline and Lucifer were definite standouts! Fall migration was kicking into full swing while we were there as well, with flocks of Hermit Warblers and Western Wood-Pewees moving through the canyons, and 17 species of shorebirds observed along with migrant waterbirds like Cinnamon Teal, White-faced Ibis and Forster's & Black Terns. A visit to this naturalist's paradise brings a wide array of plants and animals to enjoy from the blooming salvias and cactus; gorgeous insects like the Arizona Sister butterfly and the emerald-colored Glorious Scarab Beetle; to critters like White-nosed Coati and Merriman's Kangaroo Rat and the amazing diversity of herps such as Black-tailed Rattlesnake, Desert Kingsnake and the endangered Chiricahua Leopard Frog. A full accounting of the birds recorded on this year's tour can be found here- https://ebird.org/tripreport/264770

To learn more about this tour or to sign up for 2025, visit our website here: https://wingsbirds.com/tours/arizona-second-spring/

08/09/2024

Hi WINGS fans! If you’re in Tucson, please stop by our booth at the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival and say hello!

08/06/2024

Rich Hoyer reports from his recently-finished Brazil tour: We can report that the Marvelous Mato Grosso tour was a smashing success this year. A super congenial group made it very enjoyable to appreciate the amazing biodiversity of this most amazing state in the heart of Brazil. There were many memorable highlights each day, so a couple photos from each of the regions we visited merely scratch the surface of what we got to see.

07/24/2024

In mid-July, Steve Howell, accompanied by Mexican biologist and birder Jonathan Vargas, revisited María Madre Island in Mexico’s Tres Marías Islands (or Islas Marías) to learn more about this newly opened birding destination.

07/18/2024

Gavin Bieber reports after our second Alaska Majesty tour this year: The 2024 Alaska Majesty Tour found much of the western and northern sections of the state largely locked in an extended winter. Just a week prior to the start of the tour Nome was still largely frozen, with very little in the way of open water. The break-up occurred just days before our arrival, but thankfully all the roads were passable and we enjoyed great views of a suite of fantastic birds such as nesting Gyrfalcon, Rock and Willow Ptarmigan, Aleutian Tern, Bar-tailed Godwit, Eastern Yellow Wagtail and the dazzling Bluethroat (still in its active song flight courtship stage).

We then moved inland, traveling through the amazingly scenic Alaska range and the Denali region. Here we found Smith’s Longspurs on territory, a Northern Hawk Owl perched atop a roadside spruce tree, a young Boreal Owl in a nest box and a family group of Black-backed Woodpeckers nesting just off the Denali Highway. Around Anchorage we found the White-winged Crossbill numbers to be unusually high, and we also enjoyed an up-close-and-personal greeting by a tame Spruce Grouse.

Our final area for the main tour was Seward, where we found the beautiful Resurrection Bay under full sun this year, with flying Humpback Whales, some close Orca, and an amazing 10 species of alcids including more than a dozen Kittlitz’s Murrelets and some unusually cooperative Ancient Murrelets. The adjacent forests have a strong Pacific Northwest feel to them, and we enjoyed multiple views of singing Townsend’s Warblers and handsome Chestnut-backed Chickadees this year.

The variety and abundance of birdlife and wildlands that we see on this tour is staggering, and contribute to one of the best birding tours available in the United States.

*All photos Gavin Bieber

07/15/2024

Scott Olmstead reports from Costa Rica in July: "We're not quite halfway through our trip, and the birding is going great! So far we've visited two of Costa Rica's most iconic destinations for birders – Savegre and Rancho Naturalista – and we've been treated to some real quality sightings of the specialty birds that people come to Costa Rica to see like Resplendent Quetzal, Snowcap, and Sunbittern. Next stop: La Selva Biological Station and the Caribbean lowlands."

07/12/2024

Fabrice Schmitt reports from the fantastic first run of our new Central Colombia tour: Starting in Bogota, we had a first day in the Eastern cordillera, followed by some time in the Magdalena valley, and then several days at various elevations and in different habitats in the Central cordillera, ending the tour at 13,500+ feet high in the beautiful paramo of Nevado del Ruiz. It’s hard to pick the best birds of the trip amongst almost 350 wonderful species contacted in only nine days, but ‘Lunita’, the stunning Crescent-faced Antpitta coming to the worms at Hacienda El Bosque has been voted as best bird of the trip by the group! Now, we also had a very cooperative Ocellated Tapaculo showing so well in the elfin forest at Nevados del Ruiz, a beautiful male of Striolated Manakin that we could study for a long time in the scope at the Bellavista Reserve, a pair of Bogota Rail singing in the open at La Florida near Bogota, a prolonged view on a Rufescent Screech-Owl at Otun Quimbaya, and both Black-billed and Gray-breasted Mountain-Toucans coming to fruit feeders! Along with these very memorable sightings, we also had fantastic views of Crested and Sooty Ant-Tanagers, White-throated Quail-Dove, White-mantled Barbet, Crimson-mantled Woodpecker, Grass-green Tanager, Torrent Ducks, Barred Fruiteater and so many more! We also visited several hummingbird feeding stations and saw no less than 46 species of these fascinating birds! Obviously, besides the incredible diversity of birds, we were amazed by the incredible diversity of flowers, orchids, butterflies, etc. Colombia is definitely THE biodiversity country!