Photo: Bundled up and binoculars ready, our 2025 Sax-Zim Bog Winter Owl Tour gave birders the chance to experience one of North America’s most iconic winter birding hotspots. Courtesy of Sam Warren.
BY BRAD BUMGARDNER
It always starts small. You’re happy birding your home patch, maybe chasing the occasional rarity. Then one day, you want more. Eyes wide, you chase a new bird a little farther from home, and then finally you take your first “birding trip.”
For me, the gateway trip was the Badlands and Black Hills. Suddenly, I was standing in a landscape that felt ripped from a cowboy movie, with ponderosa pines instead of cornfields. In one day, I racked up more lifers than I’d seen the entire past two years. Western Tanager, American Dipper, Black-headed Grosbeak, Lazuli Bunting—all the birds that had lived in my field guide were indeed real!
That’s the spark. Costa Rica is still the classic first international trip for birders, with hundreds of species and enough infrastructure for even those outside their comfort zones away from home. Birding tourism is growing fast however, and plenty of folks now skip straight to Colombia, Guatemala, or Ecuador for their first overseas lifer rush. The list of “starter” countries is getting longer every year.
From there, it’s a domino effect. Colombia leads to Ecuador, Ecuador leads to Peru, and before you know it, a third of your downloaded Merlin pack species are tanagers. South America and the Caribbean make it easy, as they’re close enough to avoid jet lag, familiar enough to recognize a few bird families, but packed with diversity to make us American birders blow our minds each time we go down there.
Indiana Audubon is here to help keep that snowball rolling, whether you’re finding new birds in your own county or chasing them on the other side of the equator. Check out upcoming tours like Alaska (May 30-June 9, 2026) or Brazil (July 15-28, 2027) or start smaller but no less exciting with a Winter tour of Sax-Zim Bog (Feb. 13-17, 2026) or Michigan Kirtland’s Warbler experience (June 12-14, 2026). You never know which trip will be the one that starts your snowball.
Tags: birding travel
