Year: 2025

Hortobagy National Park is an amazing birding and photography destination! In winter around 200-250 White-tailed Eagles and 20-30 Eastern Imperial Eagles roam the vast grasslands, fishponds and forests. Sakertours in cooperations with the national park is operating eagle feeding stations and several different raptor hides for photography. A visit to these hides can be an amazing experience! There is no other place or hides in Europe where you can see up to 100 or 120 eagles in just 2-3 days. It is a fantastic sight to see such a huge raptors close-up and in action. White-tailed Eagles are virtually guranteed at the hides but of course numbers and opportunities slightly weather dependent. We also regularly have Eastern Imperial Eagle at the hides but especially on those days when less White-tailede Eagles visitng (as they are larger and more dominant). So if you have a day or an afternoon when not many White-tailed Eagles around you can hope for an Eastern Imperial Eagle. One of our hide is more for buzzards and the mighty Saker Falcon – the namesake of our company. And great news that yet again in the 2025-2026 winter season our regular pair of Sakers has been visiting the hide and even more good news that some other young Sakers has been photographed. Still you need luck as these falcons usually visit the hide area 3 or 4 times in a week. All in all the Hortobagy National Park is turly remarkable place to visit!

Autumn migration in the Hortobágy National Park is amazing but especially famous for the masses of cranes and geese. While October is mostly about the 100 000 – 200 000 Common Cranes and their migration spectacle (watch this video by Janos Crane roost in the Hortobágy National Park) the month of November is all about geese! We have created a tour a few years ago which is targeting to see two rare geese, the Red-breasted Goose and the Lesser White-fronted Goose. Our Red-breasted Goose Special Tour is a short break visiting the Hortobágy National Park which is one of the handful of sites in the World where the two geese species can reliably seen. And the available supporting cast is also excellent with Great Bustard, Eastern Imperial Eagle, Saker Falcon, Long-eared Owls and even Wallcreeper in most years. Yes, a great selection of top birds in such a short time!

Our 2025 tour under Dániel Balla’s expert guidence was excellent again with many sightings of both geese! Although last year was an exception when very few Red-breasted Geese were seen in the Hortobágy (in 2024) but even in such conditions we managed to find the species! However in 2025 numbers were back again and it was an excellent tour with all the top targets performing very well in exceptional great weather!

Come and join us in 2026 to see Red-breasted and Lesser White-fronted Goose! Tour date os already online!

As usual the Hortobágy National Park in the Autumn months is hosting large numbers of all kind of birds from thousands of Gadwalls and Green-winged (Eurasian) Teals through hundreds of shorebirds including – this year only several dozen – Eurasian Dotterels and of course the Common Cranes are just coming, their numbers already getting close to 50.000 in the area.

However, this year the National Park was hosting an astonishing number of Red-footed Falcons, whose numbers are usually carefully followed by the officials of the park and volunteers from the area. The census counts done every week, the mid September count producing an incredible result with over 8000 individuals staying around with a megaroost, where over 5000 Red-footed Falcons were coming together for the night forming the largest ever recorded single roost in the Carpathian Basin.

In the recent years numbers between 1000 and 2000 individuals were seen here, but this year’s numbers shooting out was a great surprise and of course fantastic experience to observe.

It has been a great team coming together on our first Serbia Butterfly Tour as we were searching for some great species in the Balkanian state of Serbia. We managed to find all our proposed targets including some of Europe’s most difficult ones like the False Comma, Lesser Lattice Brown and the dark from of Poplar Admiral (tremulae). But there were many more beauties like Violet Copper, Blue Argus, Freyer’s and Bog Fritillaries, Large Chequered Skipper and of course many many more during this short trip.

Check the details of this trip under the nature tours section or by clicking here.

The Danube Delta in winter is an exciting adventure and it did not dissapoint us in 2025 with many great photo opportunities! The breeding plumaged Dalmatian Pelicans in the snow, magical Eurasian Otters on ice, Golden Jackals fighting in their magnificent winter coat, full breeding plumaged Pallas’s Gulls, Wildcats at night, fishing White-tailed Eagles and even a few sightings of the critically endangered European Mink were certainly the highlights of the 2025 season! Please take a look at the tour description and you will see theat the Danube Delta has so much more to offer compared to a visit to Lake Kerkini. And there are even more opportunities to those aformentioned highlights such as Long-eared and Tawny Owls at night, breeding plumaged Great Cormorants, fantastic drone photography and winter-mode delta fishermens. It is a superb tour indeed if the weather is in our favour and most of February was excellent in 2025. The window for this tour is very limited hence this is a rather exclusive tour and definitely a great experience for those who up for the winter challenges! If you are interested in such an adventure you can find the 2026 tour dates online now!