Year: 2024

It has been a great autumn for birding in the Hortobágy region. The very spectacular Crane season, where more than 150.000 Common Cranes are staging inside the Hortobágy National Park was again providing some unforgettable experience for birders visiting the area with seeing them on their night roost being the highlight of every birding tour this time. Of course, other specialities of the area still present at the same time and probably this time of the year is the best to see as many Eastern Imperial Eagles as possible in the region if someone is mainly after the raptors, although Saker Falcon is usually harder this time we still have good chances of finding one.
The other spectacle later Autumn is when the huge numbers of wild geese arriving from Siberia are flooding the area giving a great chance to find the endangered Lesser White-fronted Goose and Red-breasted Goose in the seemingly endless flocks of Greater White-fronted Goose. However, this year the geese were a bit late, fortunately, it seems they arrived in good number by the second half of November and both endangered species are now presenting in good numbers inside the safe borders of the Hortobágy National Park.

Seeing a wild Eurasian Lynx in daytime is dream for mammalwatchers! Most of us just dream about such an encounter and it never happens but sometimes dreams come true for some! We were lucky to encounter a Lynx on a fresh kill in September 2024. Our guide Szabolcs Kovács has been exploring the Hargita Mountains with clients when they spotted a fresh Roe Deer carcas. Szabolcs realized it was freshly killed by a Lynx, you need to know what you see! As an experiment we positioned a mobile hide in a safe distance and waited if the Lynx would come back. And not only she did come back but brought along her two Lynx cubs. They had been visiting the carcas several times in the next 46 hours. The Roe Deer was finished in less then two days. They were mostly visiting in the early hours of the day and also in the afternoon. Those 2 days were very special and we are happy that most of our team who is involved with our mammal tours or Lynx tours managed to see this beautiful animal. Even some very lucky clients could enjoy it. Thanks for all to make it happen but especially for Szabolcs!

We regularly encounter wild Eurasian Lynx on our early spring Eurasian Lynx Tour but especially the Lynx Photography Tours led by our expert Lynx tracker Ferenc Alpár Gothárd. It is not something we can guarantee but every time we definitely try hard to find one!

Our annual tour to Romania has ended. This is a relatively short 9 days tour aiming to see as many mammal species as possible! Yet again it was an action packed tour with a lot of mammal sightings and fantastic starry nights in the Danube Delta and the Carpathians. This year we saw an amazing 58 species of mammals and this was the first time we could observe the rare Marbled Polecat. There were many other highlights too which included a rather brief European Mink sighting as well as Eurasian Forest & Hazel Dormouse, Romanian and Common Hamster, Northern Birch Mouse, Bechstein’s and Geoffroy’s Bats and five spoecies of shrews! A great tour with lots of fun! This is still the ultimate mammal tour in Europe, so if you want to see mammals in this continent this is a tour for you! Come and join us in 2025!

Our Bee-eater hide was excellent throughout June and most of July with some excellent actions. These colorful birds are always firm favorites for our guests and spending a few hours with their daily activity offers a great chance and unique experience. Europe’s most colorful birds usually arrive back in early May and start their activity around the breeding places. Normally from 15 or the latest from 20th May their photography can start. In 2024 it was an extreme years when the first Bee-eaters were observed as early as mid April in Hungary and the entire breeding season was early. We had fantastic mating activity already from 10th May and action never stopped until late July. Great fun! Come and join us for our June 2025 Hortobagy Bird Photography tour: https://www.sakertour.com/hide-photography/hungary-photo-tours/spring-summer-hide-photography-tour/#price-and-date

We finished our annual GT the first time excluding Slovakia from the itinerary, thus being one day shorter and visiting Hungary and Transylvania (Romania) only during the tour.
Our expectations were exceeded as we managed to record more species during the tour as on any previous one and broke the ‘record’ standing for 10 years as we managed to put down 234 bird species on our list.

Luckily all major highlights were seen, including 10 woodpecker and 9 owl species with the tricky Three-toed Woodpecker, the scarce White-backed Woodpecker included as well as the sought-after Ural Owl and Tengmalm’s Owl.
We birded the lowlands in Hungary with great wetlands giving us such great birds as Broad-billed Sandpiper and Great Snipe, while reaching higher altitude zones in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania where we saw Western Capercaillie, Eurasian Pygmy Owl and ‘Carpathian’ Brown Bears. The most scenic parts in Transylvania were the Békás Gorge where Wallcreeper was a dream bird for many of us to see and the Torockó Valley which held some trickier to see species like Sombre Tit and Common Rock Thrush.

Click here for the report of the tour with all the details and images give a concise reading what happened in 11 days of birding in Central Europe.

We have just finished the inaugural Transylvania Butterfly Tour with Mariposa Nature Tours. This tour was designed to see the rare Danube Clouded Yellow. We had a great time and the weather was also very cooperative. Not only we managed to find several Danube Clouded Yellows but we also had Violet Copper, Woodland Brown, the rare Spinose Skipper, a really early Poplar Admiral and many many Large Coppers and both Scarce and Marsh Fritillaries. A wonderful butterfly tour topped with great sightings of Brown Bears from our hides in Hargita and some wonderful scenery and home-made food.

Male and female Danube Clouded Yellows in flight. Image by Janos Olah

After our Romania Mammal Tour we will have an extension where our friend and mammal expert Zsolt Hegyeli will be looking for the Grey Dwarf Hamster (Nothocricetulus migratorius) which has been found at a few locations in Romania. It is a widely distributed species in the Palearctic but there is no chance to see it in Europe west of Romania. Zsolt has been on the field in April 2024 and managed to see a single individual (see image below), so our chances are really good as we now have an exact location to try and not only locations where it has been found in owl pellets. Come and join us for this 6 days (5 nights) tour from 1-6 September 2024. If you interested to join this adventure please let us know, send an email to our office for more informations! Tour price is 990 euro including single room. A great opportunity to look for a rare European mammal!

Grey Dwarf Hamster in Romania, 2024 (image by Zsolt Hegyeli)

It is a rare event nowadays to launch a new nature (bird and mammal) photography tour in Europe! We have succesfully tested and run three of our new photography tours in January and February 2024. Our guests enjoyed this new adventure and despite the very mild weather in the winter of 2023-2024 they all had great experience photographing Golden Jackals in winter coat, Wildcats in winter coat, Dalmatian Pelicans in breeding dress, fishing White-tailed Eagles and a few more extras! A fantastic new tour for nature photographers! Come and joins us for next winter (2025 )though because of our small group size limit, and the very short possible window for this tour only very limited places still available. Check out the full tour!

Finally we got around to create a fantastic tour for butterfly lovers who are after some exciting species in Europe. We have been testing this tour in the last two years and our main focus is to find the rare False Comma. It is definitely not guaranteed that we will find one, but certainly we will visit the best place for this species in Europe in the best period to maximize our chances. Of course there will be many other exciting butterflies on the wing such as Balkan Copper, Bog and Freyer’s Fritillary, Bulagrian Ringlet, Russian and Eastern Large Heath etc. If you like butterflies this is a wonderful tour for you!

Sakertour team

This amazing mammal tour we created and run the first time in 2020 is certainly amongst the top mammal tours to Europe at the moment. Our first tour recorded 46 species in 2020, the next one recorded 49 species in 2021 and eventually we had 50 species in 2022! We knew if weather and luck is on our side this tour is capable to reach even more mammal species but we never dreamed of seeing 60 species on such a shrot tour. This is what happened in 2023 and surely it was an amazing tour even though we missed the European Mink in the Danube Delta. You can read the report here! As far as we know this is by far the longest mammal list on any 9 days (8 nights) tour in Europe! I am almost certain the record will not be broken by us easily and the regularly doable realistic number is a 45-55 mammals on this tour. It is still an amazing result and a great adventure! For those who like to be out at night and experience some superb starry skies (like in the Danube Delta) as well as mammal watching this is a fantastic adventure. Come and join us! Here you can check dates and avaialabilities! Zoltán Gergely Nagy

Our long standing Hungary, Slovakia & Transylvania tour was running in this 12 days form the last time in 2023. Now our report of the 2023 tour is available and from 2024 it will be reduced to 11 days and we will not have a scheduled visit to Slovakia. We will keep it optional depending on the year and especially the owl breeding situation. If we believe it is good to go we may visit Slovakia within the current itienary. We hope to achive the same general result for this remarkable tour which has recorded between 213 to 230 species in the last ten tours, but with one less day! Sakertour team