Tanager Tours - Birding in Peru and South America
Introduction
Tanager Tours is a leading Tour Operator for Birding trips to Peru and other South American destinations. The company’s name alludes to the magnificent colours and diversity of South American Tanagers and symbolizes the richness and variety of our tours.
Active in Peru since 1999, Tanager Tours’ trademark is a high degree of reliability against relatively low prices. We offer tailor-made tours as well as standard routes,
What makes us different?
Tanager Tours is a small but stable travel agency. Our staff consists of good guides supported by reliable drivers. Our guides have extensive language skills, speaking Spanish, English, Dutch, German and Japanese. We have minimal overhead and advertising costs: Tanager Tours’ philosophy is that our customers will find us because we offer quality tours that result in satisfied clients.
Our quality is based on the use of reliable and robust equipment and keeping group sizes small – generally between 2 to 7 clients. To back up these strengths, our drivers are not just good chauffeurs, but also skilled mechanics.
We are realistic in what is possible when birding – although we also do our utmost to show our customers as much as possible of Peru’s splendour and do all we can to answer the clients’ wishes for endemic or difficult to find species, we do not build castles of air. Our strategy is to make a realistic plan, based on thorough correspondence, to attain our clients’ targets. Tanager Tours’ guiding principle is that our tours should surpass your expectations, not to evoke unrealistic expectations that we cannot substantiate. After all, birds remain birds, and that is exactly their attraction.
General nature and birdwatching trips
Tanager Tours offers a variety of trips in Peru, visiting an astounding diversity of habitats. Please have a look at the trip overview on our site to get an impression of what is possible. It goes without saying that the various itineraries can be adjusted – trips are based on the minimum number of days to make them successful, but adding days increases chances of finding hard to see or rare species. These general trips are developed to give a good impression of the fantastic nature and birding world of Peru. Often they form templates for the tailor-made specialised birding trips.
Specialised birding trips
The guiding principle here is that the sky is the limit. Through many years of experience in Peru, we are well equipped to design a custom itinerary that maximizes specialties and endemics, visit areas of special interest or to focus on especially sought-after species. Through pre-trip consultation, we will formulate a plan that best fits your needs while using our experience to advise as to what is feasible.
Sometimes groups of birdwatchers want to find their own birds, in which case we can offer the services of our experienced drivers who generally have excellent knowledge of the sites that need to be visited.
Nature-Culture Tours
For those who would like to devote some time to Peruvian culture as well as nature and birdwatching, we offer trips that include visits to famous cultural-historical sites. In our nature-culture tours sections you can find more information on these options.
Special possibilities
Often our customers would like to participate in our programs but have no travel companions at hand. To attend to such people, Tanager Tours offers two solutions. Firstly, we offer so-called “fixed-departures,” for which itineraries are pre-planned, and the places available on the tour are open to anyone, including solo travellers. Three clients are required to make these trips happen; up to 6 or 7 places are available. Of course, if only one or two people sign up, it is possible to do the tour as a private trip. A second option is to join a tour that has already been booked by another group. Often small groups wanting to do a specific trip welcome other travellers in order to economise the cost. Information can be found on our site under “fellow travellers sough.”
Research trips
Tanager Tours regularly organises research trips to deepen our knowledge or to chart a previously unknown birding area. On these trips, the outcome and species are of course not guaranteed, but they offer good value travelling for adventurous birders. The travelling conditions on these trips are often rustic, involving much camping and long drives, but these are sacrifices we make in our quest for knowledge. Those interested in these trips should contact us to see if any are planned.
Other destinations in South America
Although Tanager Tours started as a specialist in Peru, the enthusiasm of its staff to study birds also in other places has lead to the situation that we are starting to offer trips to other South American countries. In 2007, we have tours planned for Colombia and Venezuela, and for 2008 we will be adding Bolivia and Argentina.
Support conservation programs
Peru’s natural heritage, like that of many developing countries, is facing strong threats, and we – along with many of our clients – feel uneasy enjoying this natural beauty without doing anything to help conserve it. In the past, we were sceptical towards many Peruvian NGOs involved in environmental projects, but with the promising development of Asosiación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN), this has changed. Therefore 5% of all proceeds are donated to ECOAN. For more information on this relationship, see elsewhere on our site.
 |
TANAGER TOURS | |
| Las Magnolias 515, dpe. 402 | ||
| California | ||
| Trujillo - Perú | ||
| Phone: | +51 44 423752 | |
| e-mail: | info@tanagertours.com | |
design and development by Jeronimo Design