The Best Cape Town Birding

Are you ready for what will truly be the holiday of a lifetime?

Whether you want to spend your whole holiday with binoculars and bird books in hand, or whether you would like to intersperse your days of birding with a day on the beach, a visit to a wine estate, a trip to an historic site like Robben Island or a museum, Cape Town will accommodate you.

Perhaps you like to have the guidance of a local expert who knows what to expect and has the experienced eyes to help you quickly distinguish between species and identify juveniles. Or perhaps you prefer to keep your own counsel and rely on your own experience and your chosen book.

Whatever your preferences, we know and love the area, we have access to the expert guides and we can work with you to make sure that your holiday is absolutely brilliant.

Cotact us today to start the planning process!

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The Best Options For Cape Town Birding

There are enough things to do to keep you birding in Cape Town for weeks ...

One of the most exciting things to do in Cape Town is to go on a pelagic trip. They go to areas where there is a lot of trawler activity. Anything up to seven species of albatross may be seen, as well as several species of petrel, shearwater, gull, cormorant, tern, jaeger, and skua.
Wetlands: There are several wetland areas that offer fantastic birding opportunities. The main ones are Strandfontein waste water works, Rietvlei and Rondevlei. Here you may find an overwhelming number of species ranging from ducks (e.g. Cape Teal, Yellow Billed Duck, Cape Shoveler, various grebes, Southern Porchard and Maccoa Ducks), waders (e.g. Greater and Lesser Flamingoes, Pelicans, Coots, Moorhens, Swamphens, Thick-knees, Avocets, Stilts, Crakes, many different species of tern, and African Jacanas), raptors (e.g. Yellow Billed and Black Shouldered Kites, African Marsh Harriers, African Fish Eagles, Jackal Buzzards, Peregrine Falcons and Spotted Eagle Owls) and others (e.g. Cape Longclaws, Cape Grassbirds, various weavers and warblers, Karoo Scrub-Robin and Fiscal Flycatcher). And of course WAGTAILS (Cape, Citrine, and our personal favourites - Western Yellow).
Nature areas: the best known of the other birding spots is Kirstenbosch, the fantastic botanical gardens, but Table Mountain, Silvermine and the Cape Peninsula Nature Reserve (towards Cape Point) are all wonderful sites. One list of the most common birds at Kirstenbosh alone has more than 50 names on it. You can expect to find sugar birds, sun birds, waxbills, several different cuckoos, herons, bitterns, storks, not to mention swifts, swallows and so on.
Within range of an easy day's outing from Cape Town are several mountain ranges which offer more opportunities to see the birds that you might see in the Cape Peninsula nature areas. To the east, the Hottentots Holland and the Kogelberg, to the north the Helderberg, the Drakenstein Mountains, the Winterberg and the Cedarberg. There is public access to all these and the birding is wonderful in most of them.

You could stay in Cape Town or in one of the smaller towns or the rural areas, or you could move from place to place. The options are endless.

Let us help you decide what will work best for you.

Contact us and we will get back to you for a no-obligation discussion about what your holiday might look like!