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Top 10 bird watching vacations in Europe

Our bird watching vacations take place in beautiful corners of Europe – from wetlands to mountains, to sea cliffs and countryside, and are run by specialist guides who love sharing their spots with guests. From bird cliffs to breeding grounds to boat trips, here’s where to find the best bird watching Europe has to offer on our vacations.

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Top 10 bird watching vacations in Europe

Every year 90 million birds use the East Atlantic Flyway – an epic route across the skies that takes them between the Arctic and Africa. Where better to stop along the way than some of Europe’s wildest wetlands? Here they rest and feed – swelling resident populations and making for a birding bonanza.

Our top 10 bird watching trips in Europe trace these routes, taking you to the best places to see amazing birds in Europe. Discover the sites that are the important staging grounds for migration, the secret places where there are no people, but plenty of puffins; no roads but plenty of raptors. And, from hides to hotels, plan a vacation with us that stays where the action is. Read on for a run-down of our best bird watching vacations in Europe.

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1. Pelican paradise in Montenegro

Hundreds of thousands of birds spend their winter on a single lake in Montenegro. As well as being the home the world's second largest colony of pygmy cormorants, Lake Skadar is an important home for the Dalmatian pelican, which our trips help support. Some portion of past trip profits have gone into restoring nesting rafts, so that the pelicans can reproduce in peace – and today 10 percent of your trip cost goes to supporting wildlife conservation in Montenegro. Come in April for a bird bonanza – migration and breeding season all rolled into one.

Best time to go: April
Our top trip: Montenegro bird watching vacation
See all our trips: Montenegro vacations
Read more: Our guide to Montenegro

2. A profusion of puffins in Iceland

There are a lot of puffin plushies in the souvenir shops of Reykjavik – but why plump for one of those when you can go out and see the real thing? The country shelters around 60 percent of the world’s Atlantic puffins. To see them in all their glory, head to the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar), off the south coast, or Grimsey, off in the north. It’s a three-hour ferry to Grimsey, but it’s worth it: the island is essentially one big bird colony. Join our small group tour for five days with much ado about puffins.

Best time to go: June
Our top trip: Photograph puffins in the Arctic Circle
See all our trips: Vacations in Iceland
Read more: Our guide to Iceland

3. Farmland transformed in the Danube Delta

In 2016 the Carasuhat area of Romania’s Danube Delta opened to bird watchers. These hundreds of hectares of former farmland have been returned to wetland nature, and Mahmudia, the community at its center, can now earn a living from slow tourism. Whilst pelicans are easy to see, others in the cast of hundreds of species take a bit more patience. On our vacations you can spend hours on the water, going by boat through channels between reed beds, and across lakes, eyes peeled for your next exciting sighting. Carasuhat is part of the famous Danube Delta, Europe’s largest wetland area.

Best time to go: April to September
Our top trip: Danube Delta birdwatching tour
See all our trips: Romania wildlife vacations
Read more: Our Romanian wildlife guide

4. Great birding on the Great Hungarian Plain

Hungary’s massive Hortobagy National Park is the largest continuous semi-natural grassland in Europe. On this unique, rough grassland steppe, known as puszta, birds might be harder to spot at first than the wild horses, but once you get your eye in there are all manner of wetland birds, plus red-footed falcons, great bustards and rollers. These big skies and vast grasslands seem endless, but it’s all just a couple of hours’ drive from Budapest, and just an hour to the heavily forested Bukk National Park: a totally different, yet totally rewarding, spot for birders.

Best time to go: All year round except November
Our top trip: Bird watching short break to Hungary
See all our trips: Hungary vacations
Read more: Our guide to birdwatching in Hungary

5. A drive-in bird cliff in Norway’s Lofoten Islands

‘Uninhabited island’ might give you the wrong impression of Bleiksoya in northern Norway. This dramatic cone of rock off the island of Andoya in Vesteralen is home to thousands of puffins. Approach under sail for the full sensory experience of the chaos and noise of birds. It’s one of many great birding moments you can experience on our bird watching vacations in Norway. In the Lofoten Islands, go by boat in Trollfjord, and you can see Europe’s largest eagle up close and personal; Nordland has the largest population of sea eagles in Europe. Or go by car: drive just outside of Hamnoy, and you’ll quickly reach a whole cliff covered in kittiwakes.

Best time to go: June and July
Our top trips: Whale and bird watching vacation and Lofoten Islands summer photography vacation
See all our trips: Norway wildlife vacations
Read more: Our guide to Norway wildlife

6. Tens of thousands of cranes in Spain

It’s not just sun-seeking northern Europeans like me who like heading to Spain to survive the winter: plenty of birds do too. Twice a year the skies above the Laguna de Gallocanta fill with grey cranes as they gather on their migration between their winter home in southern Spain and their northern European breeding grounds. Say it after me: the cranes in Spain are grey in the main, and land on the plains. Want more big birds? The Pyrenees are home to bearded vultures – whilst Andalucia’s Donana National Park is great for flamingos.

Best time to go: November and February
Our top trips: Bird watching vacation in Northern Spain and Andalucia birding tour in Spain
See all our trips: Spanish Pyrenees vacations
Read more: Our guide to wildlife in the Spanish Pyrenees

7. Off the beaten track into Armenia

You’ll need to get in a Jeep to reach some of Armenia’s best birding spots. Head off into the rugged, forested mountains of the southernmost province of Syunik by 4x4 to reach Kaler village, where just a handful of shepherds live in the summer in a mostly abandoned farming settlement. There might not be many people, but plenty of birds thrive on these high mountain pastures. Armenia packs a lot of birdlife into a small country and well over 300 species have been recorded here. On our vacations, head to Lake Sevan for endemic Armenian gulls, and the slopes of Mount Aragats for bird watching at altitude.

Best time to go: April to September
Our top trip: Armenia birdwatching tour
See all our trips: Romania wildlife vacations
Read more: Our Armenia travel guide

8. Eleanora’s falcon in Greece

Eleanor of Arborea was a Sardinian monarch, and a heroine: she was the first ruler in history to protect hawk and falcon nests from illegal hunting. Eleanora’s falcon is her namesake, and this beautiful falcon arrives in late April in the Dodecanese island of Karpathos to spend the summers – who wouldn’t? It’s a highlight of our bird watching vacation on this island, which has a Natura 2000 reserve and provides a handy final stopover for migrating birds traveling between Europe and Africa. Karpathos is also a great island for our walking and botanical vacations.

Best time to go: April to September
Our top trip: Bird watching vacation in Greece
See all our trips: Vacations in Greece
Read more: Our guide to Karpathos

9. St Kilda’s sky-high sea cliffs

The inhabitants used to hunt seabirds; now, it’s a bird haven, abandoned by humans. The St Kilda archipelago is at the very edge of the Outer Hebrides, and its massive cliffs are home to everything from northern gannets and northern fulmars to Atlantic puffins. Away from the cliffs, there’s also an endemic wren: the St Kilda wren – just slightly larger than its tiny mainland counterpart. These islands are so remote that it’s not always possible to reach them by boat on our vacations; count yourself lucky if this UNESCO-listed landscape is in the offing.

Best time to go: May to July
Our top trip: St Kilda, Outer Hebrides cruise
See all our trips: Small ship cruises in Scotland
Read more: Our guide to cruising the Outer Hebrides

10. From bears to birds in the Svalbard archipelago

It’s hard for a cruise in Svalbard to be strictly labelled as a bird watching vacation: not when there’s the chance to see walruses and even polar bears around the archipelago. On our vacations you can come cruising here on a research vessel – where there are lectures on birdlife and ecology in between shore expeditions and trips in the Zodiac. See thousands of Brunnich’s guillemots swarming the basalt columns of Alkefjellet, and keep on guard for brave Arctic terns, which defend their nests with extraordinary ferocity.

Best time to go: June
Our top trip: North Spitsbergen cruise
See all our trips: Spitsbergen vacations
Read more: Our Spitsbergen travel guide