Avian Safaris
Avian Safaris set out to do something different; to offer birders birdwatching expeditions far from the ordinary, customised, unique, relaxed, energetic, bonding and indulgent vacations for individuals and families. It seems a lot of people like their birding Tours that way. People have trusted us to design exciting, fun-filled vacations for them, their families and others. We can “tailor-make” a birdwatching trip that will linger in a lifetime’s worth of memories. On our tours you will visit birdwatching spots untouched by mass tourism, have endemic, endangered, and restricted species, and fun with new friends from around the world who share your sense of adventure. Take some time and look at the attractive range of Tours/Safaris and Excursions we offer on our website. We are very flexible and want you to get the most out of your birding time. Just tell us exactly what you have in mind, and we will be happy to arrange something for you.
Patient Office Staff
We know that great birding experiences require hours of preparation; therefore, we focus on individual or group needs while designing Itineraries. We provide skilled handling of all the technical and logistical details: securing the correct understanding of your individual or group needs and interests.
We pride ourselves on the approachability of our dedicated and dynamic staff and the friendliness of their service. Our team is always available to respond personally to your comments if they are to place together a unique and satisfactory tour experience suiting your birding tour requirements. Please call or email our office anytime and ask any questions you would like to. You will find helpful and courteous service, and we always enjoy chatting with actual and potential birders; therefore, if you have any questions about our tours, please get in touch. We want to hear from you.
Having such a dedicated and efficient team behind you makes all the difference when it comes to having an enjoyable tour, both before, during and after the trip.
Halimah Nagujja
You will find Halima most welcoming with excellent communication skills. For this reason, she initiates a response to you when you drop us an inquiry. She is a professional accountant (BBA, CPA), and she supplemented her professional skills with communication training. She manages our books alongside putting together outstanding travel plans.
She loves nature and travelling to explore places and is a very leisurely birder. In her six years of birding, her world list is stuck at eighty-six species; the rest of it is just looking at nature’s beauty and moving on.
A trained and professional bird guide is essential for any birdwatching tour; our guides are carefully chosen on merit. They are personable and knowledgeable with impressive academic and professional backgrounds and have all the skills to conduct an extended birding tour professionally and ensure every individual has a great time.
Our professional local birding guides have grown up within their guiding areas (Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda), chasing after birds and small mammals as children. They have gone through Bird, Cultural, Wildlife, and extensive tour guiding courses and belong to regional guides clubs. In Uganda, they are members of the Uganda Bird Guides Club (UBGC), Uganda Cultural Guides Club (UCGC) and Uganda Safari Guides Association (USAGA) which is the umbrella association for all guide clubs in the country.
Our Knowledgeable Birding guides fluently speak English, and there is hardly a question they are likely not to answer. They will guide you on your excursion, tour, or safari to all the birding spots included in the itinerary and work to their best for every group member to see a specific bird at a place. Their expertise guarantees leading you to sought-after species, hence an excellent experience.
We emphasise quality bird-watching tours: The primary aim of our guides is to show you those birds which are remarkable and elusive, the likes of the endemics, restricted-range, endangered, vulnerable and threatened.
Please note that a knowledgeable guide is key to the success of any organised birdwatching trip, and for independent birdwatchers with high expectations, hiring a local guide is highly beneficial because it increases the chances of seeing the less common and domestic species, contributes to the local economy and creates an incentive to protect birds.
Prossy Nanyombi
Prossy has been privileged from childhood! She grew up in locations where she got exposed to learning many birds by their local names. These birds her tribe conserves in a manner of honouring them as clan totems. Keen prossy, picked birds by which trees and thickets they loved. After doing her diploma in tourism, she quickly looked for the section that kept her with nature which she believes is the home she can ever know and found her way to the Mpanga forest. This forest is under the management of the National Forestry Authority and lies approximately forty minutes’ drive west of Kampala. At Mpanga forest, she practised birds, trees and butterflies as this would be her everyday life- looking at nature with visiting tourists. She deeply understood the forest and wildlife. She has generated much knowledge on wildlife through a few pieces of training with the Uganda Safari Guides Association along with birding and nature walks with the country’s top naturalists.
Today, Prossy is the Vice-Chairperson of the Uganda Women Birder’s Club. She is outstanding evidence of changing the nation by equipping women with knowledge.
Today, Prossy lives at Mpanga forest edges with her family. This close, she and the birds are inseparable.
Tonny Sserugga
Tonny, the one with a perfect sense of humour, is a professional teacher. A teacher who loves art and whose pieces have always been inspired by nature. After following Crammy’s social media network posts, he believed these were the birds in their natural setting that he was meant to paint; he, therefore, started spending a considerable portion of his time in proper natural environments to get the best coverage of birds. While wandering all over the country for the most exquisite paintings, birds’ behaviour dragged him to become a bird watcher more than a painter. He started tagging on scouting trips and joined nature and conservation walks organised by Avian Safaris, Uganda Safari Guides Association (USAGA), Nature Uganda, Uganda Bird Guides Club and many more. He has completed several pieces of training on birding and nature guiding that have been facilitated by the Uganda Safari Guides Association. Tonny enjoys driving, showing and teaching people birds; his sense of humour has always left a lot to be admired by our clients. Tonny leads trips in Uganda and Rwanda
After studying a tour and travel course, Veronica was confident that travelling did not mean sitting in a beautiful office but being out in the field, wandering from one place to another.
Her leisurely birding practice in the wild environments she passionately treasured from childhood every morning picked up at a breakneck pace every time she observed unexpected bird behaviour. Veronica started joining nature walks and birding excursions that were organised by USAGA, Uganda Women Birders, Uganda Bird Guides Club, and Nature Uganda which is an affiliate of BirdLife International and never missed joining the Avian Safaris’ scouting trips to the different parts of Uganda and Rwanda.
She has done several guiding pieces of training with USAGA. She has been out on several field knowledge-sharing practices with Crammy Wanyama and Herbert Byaruhanga, some of the region’s most enthusiastic birders. Veronica leads Avian Safaris’ tours in Uganda and Rwanda.
Veronica results from the Avian Safaris conservation efforts through training women. She lives on the outskirts of Kampala with her son.
Crammy Wanyama
Meet Crammy, a passionate birder born and raised in Uganda. His childhood attachment to birds haunted him to adulthood amidst his adventurous character. His business administration transcripts and spending days in a squared building offering IT solutions did impress him more than being out interacting with nature. At the end of 2010, he went for an introduction to guiding training arranged by the (USAGA). On the third evening of field practice, Crammy locked eyes with a duetting pair of Black-headed Gonoleks patched less than three meters from him; this was the turning point. Anxious about the details of these birds, he came to realise that their kind of habitat is what his family and neighbours had wiped out in the name of agriculture and better human settlement! From this experience, he set 2011 as a change of life year; he continuously read and attended a few conservation pieces of training to understand what he unknowingly would later share with his home people and birding clients.
In his conservation efforts, he tagged friends to come along on his practising and scouting adventures and engaged the curious kids and adults he met in the bushes while practising birds. Having learned from almost everyone, from staunch regional conservationists to his clients, he believes sharing is the simplest way to learn and teach most conveniently. Also, for the guiding interests, he related the bird calls he heard in the field to music tunes that played several nights in the music production studio, where he spent plenty of time with his musician friends. He attached most calls to specific familiar musical instruments that he had encountered. Although he appreciated colourful birds, his connections to musical instruments dragged him into paying much attention to strict African families like Alaudidae (Larks) and Cisticolidae, which are very vocal birds. This solo practice got his birdcall identification in a very comfortable position before he started leading birding tours. This is a much easier way to find forest birds.
Crammy started Avian Safaris to speed up his conservation (with a significant focus on habitat restoration) funding efforts and has teamed up with local birding communities in the region to participate in several birding and nature excursions. He has voluntarily served on the local Bird Guides Clubs and USAGA. USAGA has awarded Crammy as the year’s Best Birding Guide and the Best Guide in Uganda on different occasions.
He leads Avian Safaris tours in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya & Tanzania. He has served as the head guide at Bird Uganda Safaris, a local birding tour company in Uganda. Away from East Africa, he has traversed Namibia with his Namibian family at Batis Birding Safaris and led trips and shared his guiding passions in several countries and islands on two continents with Tropical Birding Tours.
This fanatical naturalist loves spending time with his family when not doing tours just like he enjoys showing people birds in the field.
Consistent, high-quality services cannot be provided at a significant discount, although we are dedicated to providing quality and satisfactory tours and excursions at prices which are affordable. Contact us for a quotation; you will not be disappointed.
You will find our sales consultants friendly, supremely knowledgeable and prepared to go that extra mile to ensure you have the most excellent tour at the most attractive price without compromising on the experience. When you contact us, you will have direct telephone numbers of your consultant throughout the booking process.
Financial Security
Avian Safaris is a Ugandan fully registered business and bonded tour operator (No. 187156 in the index of registration), so you can be sure that all payments made to us in advance of your tour are adequately protected. It might be quite challenging to let you know how important it is to book your tours with a reliable company. It may cost a bit more, but a financial failure that leaves you with a severe problem is far less likely.
We are such a credible tour operator company in the country; this is evident from our strong ties with the prime stakeholders in Uganda’s tourism industry. Not only are we corporate members of Nature Uganda (NU)- a branch of the East Africa Natural History Society (EANHS), Uganda Safari Guides Association (USAGA)- The umbrella association of guides and guides clubs in Uganda, Uganda Bird Guides Club, Uganda Cultural Guides Club, but also in good books with Uganda Wildlife Authority, Uganda Tourism Board along with several others.
Group Size
At Avian Safaris, we have low group size limits of any extensive birdwatching tour. Our Off-the-shelf tours of six (6) individuals will bread a quality tour since better communication is assured, and there are higher chances of seeing birds clearly and firmly even when birding in Uganda’s Rain Forests.
Quality Hotels
We operate with a variety of hotels which have been carefully selected on merit and frequently checked to ensure they meet our rigorous standards, many have been chosen for their commitment to sustainable tourism. As well as location, our selection also reflects our personal preference for places with character where the owners and managers like to engage with their guests.
We have contracts with a significant number of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda hotels; this means we can pass on substantial savings to our clients and also guarantees us the control to ensure the content and quality of your stay is of acceptable standards.
Comfortable Reliable 4×4 Vehicles
We have 4×4 vehicles, suitable for a variety of road conditions and game drives with ‘pop-up’ tops to maximise birding and Game viewing even in the savannah amidst the wild beasts. All vehicles have seat belts, a window seat for every member on board to enjoy magnificent views and do photography and the comfort of all passengers. They all have a ‘no smoking’ policy.
Safari Jeep
Safari Vehicle
Our Vision
We aim at establishing ourselves as a niche player in the private sector of Uganda’s avian tourism. By participating in conservation programs and organising trips that give our guests the best travel experiences.
Mission
Internally we intend to create and nurture a healthy, exuberant, respectful, and enjoyable environment, in which our employees are fairly compensated and encouraged to respect the clients and the quality of the service we provide. Also, follow-up will be mandatory to ensure client satisfaction and make any improvements as recommended by the clients. We seek fair and responsible profit, enough to keep the company financially healthy for the short and long term and to reward our employees fairly.
Values
We exist to provide a valuable service to our clients, a rewarding opportunity for our employees, and profitability to our shareholders. We believe that success in this endeavour depends on our employees. Satisfied employees lead to happy clients, which leads to pleased shareholders. To achieve this, we enable our employees to act with an entrepreneurial spirit, and we value those willing to take responsibility for their actions. We treat employees like family, which fosters intimacy, informality, healthy relationships, caring attitudes, and it makes work more fun.
We treat employees with respect, which encourages them to treat each other and every client with respect. We want our clients to experience a legendary service that makes a lasting impression. Providing exceptional value to clients requires hard work and concentration. Hard work is most effective when processes are simple. Simplicity reduces costs and speeds processes. We believe in doing things right the first time, therefore do not cut corners.
We take pride in our efforts as well as the rewards. Throughout this endeavour, safety will be the over-riding force behind any decision. On our tours, our clients will travel in security and confidence, with professional and personable tour guides. Through their commentary, they should be able to have an in-depth look at the tour activities and the country with its people.
Objectives
- Continuously provide enjoyable quality excursions, tours and safaris on time and budget.
- Develop enthusiastically satisfied clients all of the time. Establish a market presence that assures short-term and long-term profitability, growth and success.
- We are fully committed to supporting the growth and development of sustainable tourism.
- Contribute positively to the communities in the tourist areas and wildlife Conservations.
