Birding in Vietnam Photo Gallery – March/April 2025

Leading birding tours to Vietnam is always a pleasure due to the high number of exciting birds to share with visitors in locations that usually provide good birding. With locals having set up a network of hides/blinds it is also a country that provides a lot of extremely good views of very shy and hard-to-find species. On our March/April Vietnam birding tour we saw a high proportion of our target species as well as enjoying the wider avifauna. You can read the full trip report, with a day-by-day account, here – Vietnam Birding Tour Trip Report March-April 2025.  On this page we present a wider range of bird photos from this year’s tour, in this birding in Vietnam photo gallery, along with a few notes.

Ma Da Forest Hides

It’s always great to start a birding tour with close up views of a lot of exciting birds and that is exactly what the birding hides/blinds at Ma Da Forest provide. Our first stop after leaving Ho Chi Minh City there are a lot of spectacular and much-wanted species to open the tour with and it provides top quality birding with very little effort; perfect after a long haul flight. For those who are birders through and through there are unprecedentedly good views of top quality birds such as Siamese Fireback, Blue-rumped Pitta and White-throated Rockthrush while for the photographers it is a day to fill the memory cards!

Cat Tien National Park

Cat Tien National Park is an awesome birding location and a must-visit site for anyone birding in Vietnam. An enormous area of lowland forest with an excellent network of quiet tracks and trails for birders to explore and a welath of birdlife. With species such as Germain’s Peacock Pheasant and Bar-bellied Pitta to be found here expectations are always high and Cat Tien always delivers a wide selection of high quality birds and this visit was no exception.  Several hides and a high abundance of birds makes for excellent birding and great photo opportunities.

Di Linh

Di Linh provided our first higher altitude birding on this tour and with it a high number of new species. Although the weather was poor on this visit we still saw not just a lot of good birds but a really wide variety of species with some open-country and ride field birding to add to the forest. An afternoon session here resulted in us having an encounter with an immediate candidate for bird of the trip in Indochinese Green Magpie and considering the weather, the hides at Di Linh were essential in us seeing more than just a handful of our target species. In addition to lots of good birds there was good food and pleasant accommodation to enjoy too.

Dalat

Pine forested hill ridges and moist valley forests are the main habitats spread over a wide area around the city of Dalat, set upon a highland plateau and a centre of endemism within Vietnam; as such it is a must-visit location for birding in Vietnam. Spending several days here in a comfortable hotel allowed us to explore the area at length and find a wide variety of superb birds including the endemic Vietnamese Cutia. With great birding along quiet roads and trails there was plenty to see and there were also some real surprises at the hides we visited here. 

Mang Den

Birding here is famously difficult but our experience on this trip was quite different with plenty to see, particularly on our first morning here. Forest patches within a short drive of a nice hotel provided us with a number of feeding flocks of small birds that included the much-wanted Yellow-billed Nuthatch that we had struggled to locate at previous locations.  Although some of the key species here proved very difficult to see we had an extremely magical moment with a Chestnut-eared Laughingthrush, an exceptionally range-restricted regional endemic.

Ngoc Linh

The mystical, magical, ferny forest at Ngoc Linh looks exactly like the type of habitat that would hold some amazing birds and so it is. Birding in this prehistoric-like forest is something special and watching flocks of colourful birds passing through mossy branches is always a please. However, some very special birds that come to feed in an area overlooked by a hide/blind is the main focus of the time here and when Red-tailed Laughingthrush crashes in it is like some sort of light show in the dark forest.

Join us on our next birding tour to Vietnam. Full itinerary and links to our booking page here – Vietnam Birding Tour.