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INFORMATION FOR BIRDERS

Alaska is the birder’s place to be.

An Alaska birding vacation is a must in every serious birder’s future. You simply must come to Alaska to see many of the most interesting North American species, many of which migrate from all parts of the planet to breed in Alaska’s summer season. Like those birds, many birders return to Alaska year after year to optimize their chances of seeing Asiatics during migration, or to pursue the more elusive, far-flung northern breeding birds.

We are and understand birders.

Our guides work for Wilderness Birding Adventures because they love to bird and share their birding with others. Conducting birding tours in Alaska requires skills well beyond birding.  Other birding tour companies operate trips up here, but we are the locals. We live in Alaska, love being and birding here. We know the terrain and the people. Our birding-focused trips are led by guides who are not just excellent birders but also naturalists, bringing a bigger picture to our birding than just listing.  Our backcountry trips always have at least one birder guide (and typically both guides are birders).  WBA guides possess an impressive array of additional skills for making our journeys to the outer edges of northernmost North America safe, fascinating, and fun.

Our trips are unique.

We are not trying to offer the most comfortable or most generic possible trip. Rather, we seek the unusual approach: whether staying in a Native family home in Gambell (consistently a highlight of the trip for our guests), or canoeing amid Snowy Owls and three species of Jaeger on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge, or paddling our kayaks up to a haystack rock off Shuyak Island to compare Red-faced and Pelagic Cormorants.

We can be your solution for a birding vacation with your non-birding partner or family.

Many of our trips are well rounded and rewarding to the non-birder. Exploring Alaska’s amazing wilderness with its unforgettable scenery and wildlife gets anyone’s juices going.  We will be birding all along the way; we can’t help it.

We are the true small group alternative.

We all know the drawbacks to birding in large groups.  WBA seeks to provide a premium small-group birding experience. Our group size does not exceed 10 participants.

It is about more than listing.

We seek the unusual birder, looking for people who, like us, find that birding is a challenging, rewarding pursuit not just because of the birds we tick but because of the experiences we have while pursuing those birds. When you go to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, you might see a Say’s Phoebe nest made out of white Dall Sheep hair from a nearby bear-killed carcass, or discover Gray-headed Chickadees nesting in tree cavities where trees aren’t supposed to exist! You might sit on the beach at Gambell watching the thousands of alcids streaming by as barnacled gray whales break the ocean’s surface on their northward migration. We are often putting the birdwatching back into birding.

At Wilderness Birding Adventures, good birding is not just about the list. It’s more about birding as a means to great adventures in the wild corners of Alaska and beyond.

“The whole trip was a highlight. An unexpected bonus was the people, the town, and the island. I loved them all. I came for the birds, but I got much more.”  (Anonymous Gambell guest in reply to the question “What was the highlight of the trip for you?”)