Atlantic Puffin— Photo: Andrew Whittaker

A one-center tour based in a pleasant hotel offering good accommodations and food in picturesque Grantown-On-Spey, close to many of the prime birding sites. Great birding for Scottish specialties, plus wildlife and optional cultural and historical visits.

We have designed a very special tour offering a week of birding and historical visits in the heart of the Highlands of Scotland, based in the centrally located and attractive Grantown-on-Spey. A varied and flexible daily program will make this tour appealing to birders with non-birding partners or family.

The Highlands scenery is the most dramatic in the British Isles: the highest peaks; extensive moorlands; ancient Caledonian pine forest; a stunning coastline of cliffs, inlets, and offshore islands; vast prehistoric peat bogs; and fast-flowing rivers. We will target localized and rare specialties such as Eurasian Capercaillie, Black Grouse, Rock and Willow ptarmigan (the British subspecies known as Red Grouse), the endemic Scottish Crossbill, Ring Ouzel, Crested Tit, Horned Grebe, Arctic Loon, and raptors such as Eurasian Sparrowhawk, Golden Eagle, Osprey, Red Kite, and White-tailed Eagle. Most of these breed only within the British Isles exclusively in this wild region of Scotland, and we have good chances of seeing them all.

Loch Strathconan— Photo: Andrew Whittaker

There will, of course, be many more widespread species of interest to birders new to European birding: Great Spotted Woodpecker; Tawny Owl; Great, Blue, Coal, and Long-tailed tits; Goldcrest; Eurasian Treecreeper; White-throated Dipper; Eurasian Jackdaw; Hooded Crow; Rook; Eurasian Siskin; Eurasian Greenfinch; Chaffinch; Eurasian Bullfinch; Red Crossbill; Tufted Duck; and Common Pochard. Further opportunities exist at exciting coastal sites for migrants, shorebirds, and seabirds such as Atlantic Puffin, European Shag, Razorbill, Northern Fulmar, and Great Skua.

We will be central to many fine castles and sites of historical significance such as hugely ornate Dunrobin Castle, one of Scotland's finest stately homes; Cawdor Castle—started in the thirteenth century, mentioned in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and still lived in now; gaunt, ruined, medieval Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness; Culloden Battlefield, site of the defeat of the Jacobite Scottish Highlanders against the English monarchy in 1645; and Fort George, a huge military complex built in the eighteenth century to defend against further Jacobite invasions.

Easy day excursions covering a wonderful array of classic Scottish Highland scenery of glens, lochs, mountain, moorland, forest, and sea coast.