Welcome to our October emailing!

Fall has arrived for much of North America, and with it longer nights, frost on the pumpkin, and spookily clad trick-or-treaters ringing the doorbell in a few days. Surely none will be as eerie as this squad of Flying Foxes!

As for the birds, songbird migration is winding down across most of the continent—though there are a few sparrows and finches yet to come. There are plenty of waterfowl and raptors yet to make their annual trek to places south as well. The hummingbird feeders come in soon, and the birdseed starts flying out of the feeders.

In this month's emailing we're already looking ahead to spring and beyond, with some ideas for domestic travel, and we also showcase new and returning tours for 2024 and 2025 that are not domestic at all—Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and China, to name a few. We also have some odds and ends to report, and of course our regular features, including our popular Recent Photos Gallery—this month's collection contains more than 115 pics taken by participants and guides from 11 destinations on three continents. Lastly, we present 12 new triplists from recent tours and nine updated itineraries for 2024.

October trivia question: Colombia ranks number one on eBird with 1923 species reported. Which two countries rank second and third? (Answer at the very end of this emailing)

The creepy image above was taken last summer by tour participant Matt Denoncour on one of our two annual Borneo tours. Doug Gochfeld will guide another expedition to Borneo—one of the planet's most naturally rich places—departing February 20th, and there is space available.

Thanks also to group member Doug Clarke for the photo below of the noshing Blue Tit from our most recent Birds of Britain tour last May with Megan Edwards Crewe & Willy Perez. The tour departs again next year on May 4th, and there is still space available.

Our suite of domestic spring tours offers a variety of birding options. Some tours have a heavy focus on migration while others track down targets in reliable spots. There are "chickens" performing their funky dances in Colorado, the potential for songbird fallouts on the Texas Coast, and owls (and range-restricted specialties) in Arizona—there's even Hawaii, for something completely different. An adventure for everyone is out there! Below are a few short descriptions of tours with space available.

Texas Coast Migration Spectacle — Texas during the peak of spring migration has the potential for jaw-dropping fallouts of songbirds along the Gulf coast, and we'll be well positioned to bear witness. Daily destinations are dictated by weather (=migration) conditions. Aside from the migrants, there are specialty-species in the pine woods—southeastern gems like Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Bachman's Sparrow, and the squeaky Brown-headed Nuthatch—with coastal and marsh birds to seek as well. Purple Gallinules, Fulvous Whistling-Ducks, and Roseate Spoonbills are regulars. Guide John Coons leads two departures (as he has for many years!) April 13-19 & April 20-26 and knows exactly where to find the goods.

Texas's Big Bend & Hill Country — Places like Big Bend National Park, the Chisos and Davis Mountains, and Texas Hill Country sell themselves. But we'll throw in Colima Warbler, Golden-cheeked Warbler, Montezuma Quail, Lucifer Hummingbird, Black-capped Vireo, and a few million bats just to sweeten the pot. Chris Benesh and Alex Sundvall lead this tour April 20-29 for what will be the last time for a couple years due to renovations of the lodge in Big Bend.

Florida: Mangroves & Migrants — The Sunshine State is loaded with reasons to bird there. Our tour is focused on the southern third of the state. Guides Owen Hilchey and Micah Riegner are at the helm April 27-May 6 for eight full days of birding. We spend time in the Florida Keys, visit Dry Tortugas National Park, and pluck goodies from both the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. We target species that are at the very northern end of their ranges, such as Antillean Nighthawk, Mangrove Cuckoo, White-crowned Pigeon, and Black-whiskered Vireo. An unforgettable experience is sure to be the visit to Dry Tortugas where we sift through thousands of Brown Noddies and Sooty Terns for the uncommon Bridled Terns and rare Black Noddies.

Here is a list of all of our March through May 2024 U.S. tours (not listed here are our three Alaska tours from May 29 and in June). If a tour is fully booked, it is a good idea to put your name on the waitlist as openings do occur.

To sign up, add your name to the waitlist, or for any additional information, please contact our office.

We are pleased to review with you our new tours that are coming up in the first half of 2024 as well as some favorites returning to our schedule for the first time in several years. Contact our office to hold a space or to get on the waitlist, or please do so if you have any additional questions about any of the tours below. We cannot stress enough that it's worth getting on the waitlist for currently fully booked tours, as spots do open up regularly!

The following tours are also returning in 2024. They are all currently fully booked, but waitlists are available:

To sign up, add your name to the waitlist, or for any additional information, please contact our office.

OutBirding originated in the first year of the pandemic, and to date we have posted 100 episodes to the OutBirding library. We are very thankful to all of you who subscribed over the past three years, but with the death in July of Tom Johnson, who was a major motivating force of the OutBirding team, we have decided to discontinue OutBirding in its present form. In the near future we hope to post many of our episodes to a public site (such as the Field Guides YouTube channel) where they can be enjoyed by many. (We have posted a few OutBirding sample episodes to our YouTube channel previously.) We will make an announcement in this monthly emailing and on our Field Guides news page about any episode postings. We know how much our audience enjoys high-quality video about birds and birding, and we plan to continue adding to the content as guides have time to create new episodes.

If you have current access to our OutBirding video service, you should have received an email notification on October 11 that this service will be ending in late November 2023. If you have not seen that email message, please check your junk email folder. If you still can't find the message, contact us at [email protected] and we can re-send it to you.

We have triplists from past tours linked below, each with some lovely images and some with video clips, and all with great annotations by our guides. Enjoy!

As we mentioned last month, our Austin office was going to be on the move. It is a done deal, and we are unpacking and getting settled in nicely into our new space.

Our new address is:

We carefully read each post-tour evaluation we receive from our participants, so that we can continue to offer the best possible birding experiences and service on Field Guides birding tours. Here are a couple of representative recent comments. From all of us at Field Guides, our thanks for all your valuable feedback.

Every month we present a list of the next six months' departures that still have space available, sorted by major region. The offerings run the gamut from close-to-home domestic tours to the opposite side of the globe to boarding a re-positioning cruise and sailing from the New World to the Old. If short-term travel fits your lifestyle, or if getting away for the holidays appeals, there is surely somewhere to visit listed below that offers a new and exciting adventure. You can click any link for more information, and contact our office to book.

This month we highlight here two tours to Ecuador that include individual species in their tour names. That's a surefire way to know that there's a bird of high interest on that tour. Our Southeast Ecuador: Orange-throated Tanager & Foothill Specialties and Southwestern Ecuador Specialties: Jocotoco Foundation Reserves tours are just around the corner, departing February 15th & February 24th respectively. The first tour visits the remote southeastern corner of Ecuador and explores the upper tropical foothills in search of the gorgeous Orange-throated Tanager and other local specialties. The second tour is a quest for the recently described Jocotoco Antpitta in its tiny range in the narrow middle-elevation swath of Andes it calls home. These tours can also be combined for a longer back-to-back experience.

Back in July, the American Ornithological Society published their 64th Supplement to the Check-list of North American Birds. This annual update is where the splits and lumps happen—and how folks get "new" species added to (or subtracted from!) their lists. For North American birders, the two most prominent actions taken are the re-lumping of Western Flycatcher (Pacific-slope and Cordilleran Flycatchers were elevated to full-species status in 1989 and have reverted back to Western Flycatcher), and the splitting of Northern Goshawk to American Goshawk and Eurasian Goshawk. You can read the entire AOS supplement here.

Our friends at Cornell tell us that all the taxonomic changes will be reflected in eBird by the end of this month. If you are an eBird user, you can expect irregularities with your list totals during this weeks-long process.

Back in August we shared news about a new entry requirement for travel to European Union countries (ETIAS). Initially that requirement was to be implemented at the start of 2024, however the the new process is likely being delayed until at least 2025.

News about the delay can be found here.