Bremer Bay orcas
What a day out over the Bremer Canyon is really like, from the long boat ride to the waiting, and what to know before you book.
★★★★★ Rated 4.5 out of 5
Animals don’t perform on demand, and that’s exactly what makes the good days so special. Here’s how we plan wildlife holidays around the right season, the right guide and honest expectations.
Wildlife sits right at the top of our family’s wish list on holiday. Sloths in the trees in Costa Rica, turtles coming ashore at night, sea lions lounging about in the middle of a Chilean city. Even a field of highland cows on a wet afternoon in Britain gets the cameras out.
But wildlife is also the most season-dependent experience on our holiday experiences list, and the one most likely to disappoint when the planning goes wrong. The difference between a great wildlife day and a flat one is rarely luck. It’s information, timing and the choice of guide.
This guide is part of Stage 2 of our Platinum Travel Planning Roadmap, where you decide what kind of trip you want. It covers how to plan a wildlife experience, where and when the big encounters happen, and how to watch animals without harming them. Our own wildlife guides sit in the middle of the page.
In short: Choose the season first, the place second and the guide third, and pick an experience that’s worth having even if the headline animal never shows up.
The simple answer is that wildlife doesn’t turn up because you’ve paid for a ticket. It sounds obvious, but it’s the one thing that most reliably separates a rewarding wildlife experience from a disappointing one, and it’s the one thing a lot of tour companies quietly promise in their marketing.
In our experience, the best wildlife days aren’t always the most famous ones. They’re the ones where the place, the season and the guide all line up to give you a realistic chance of seeing what you came for, in surroundings that are worth the trip anyway. If a whole holiday hangs on one animal appearing on one day, you’re one bad storm away from a trip that feels like a failure.
Think about Jurassic Park (stay with me). Everyone on the tour wants to see the T. rex, so the whole day depends on one predator appearing on cue. It doesn’t, and the visitors are bored and fed up. The scene that actually moves them is with the sick Triceratops lying in the grass, a real animal in its own surroundings, with no performance at all.
That’s the mindset worth packing. Choose your place and season on honest odds rather than glossy photos, and make sure the setting, the journey and the guide would make the day worthwhile even if the star of the show stays hidden.
We plan wildlife days the same way we plan everything else, by working through the stages of the Roadmap in order. Here’s how the first few stages apply.
Start with who’s coming, because your companions decide which experiences are realistic before anything else.
Next, be clear about what kind of wildlife experience you’re planning. A roadside stop for kangaroos, a half-day national park walk, a full day at sea with a naturalist guide, a night-time turtle nesting tour and a multi-day safari are completely different trips. The further along that list you go, the more the season, the permits and the budget start to run the whole holiday. Zoos and rescue centres have their place too, especially with younger children, but standards vary a lot, so read recent reviews before you go.
Then work out the timing. Wildlife is more season-sensitive than any other experience on our list, because migration and breeding set the calendar, not the tourist board. Get it wrong by a few weeks and the animals simply aren’t there. That’s why we decide the wildlife window before we fix the dates, which is Stage 3 of the Roadmap, when to go on holiday.
When it comes to finding the experience, use more than one source. A booking platform like GetYourGuide is a good way to see which places have established operators if you search by species or activity rather than destination. Official national park booking systems are the authority on permits. Conservation charities and certification schemes list operators that meet welfare standards, which matters most for marine and primate trips. And small local operators often only show up through regional tourism boards.
When you read reviews, look for different things than you would for a city tour. Does the guide know how the animals behave? Do they keep a respectful distance? How recent are the reviews? And how did the guide handle the days when the headline animal didn’t appear? A company with glowing reviews from a few years ago may have changed its guides since.
Spending more doesn’t always mean a better day. Some of our best wildlife days came from modest local guides. In Manuel Antonio, on our family road trip around Costa Rica, we hired a guide to help us spot wildlife in the national park. Before we’d even reached the park gates, he’d pulled over to show us three sloths hanging in the trees by the road.
Finally, book the experiences that are the reason for the trip first. Turtle nesting tours on protected beaches, the best whale watching boats in peak season, gorilla trekking permits and safari lodges all have limited places. If a wildlife experience is why you chose the destination, treat it as the anchor booking and build everything else around it.
Most of the big wildlife encounters happen in a window fixed by biology. These are some of the most sought-after, with the rough season for each. Exact timings shift from year to year, so always check with the park or the operator before you book flights.
| Wildlife experience | Where to see it | Rough season |
|---|---|---|
| The great wildebeest migration | Southern Serengeti for calving, the Masai Mara and northern Serengeti for the river crossings | Calving early in the year, river crossings in the northern summer into autumn |
| Orcas | Bremer Bay in Western Australia, the Pacific Northwest, the Norwegian fjords, Península Valdés in Argentina | Varies by place. Bremer Bay's season runs through the southern summer into autumn |
| Polar bears | Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of Hudson Bay | Autumn, while the bears wait for the sea ice to form |
| Humpback whales | Maui and Samaná Bay in the northern winter, Queensland's coast and Mo'orea in the southern winter and spring | Winter and spring in each hemisphere |
| Green sea turtles nesting | Tortuguero in Costa Rica, Terengganu in Malaysia, the Galápagos Islands | Varies by beach. Hatchlings follow a couple of months after the nesting peak |
| Mountain gorillas | Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda | The dry seasons, when the trails are easier |
| Whale sharks | Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia, Isla Mujeres in Mexico | Ningaloo in the southern autumn and winter, Isla Mujeres in the northern summer |
| Atlantic puffins | Iceland's Westman Islands, plus UK colonies on the Farne Islands, Bempton Cliffs, Skomer and Staffa | Late spring to midsummer, while they nest |
You don’t always have to fly long haul. The UK has some of the best seabird cliffs in Europe, and our guide to Flamborough Head is a good place to start if you’d like a wildlife short break closer to home.
These are the wildlife trips we’ve written up, grouped by region. Each guide covers how to plan the day, when to go and what it was really like.
Fins & flippers
What a day out over the Bremer Canyon is really like, from the long boat ride to the waiting, and what to know before you book.
Discover these friendly dolphins living amongst the locals at Mandurah.
Watching turtles come ashore to lay their eggs on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, and how to plan the trip out to this remote corner.
Two days of sea kayaking in search of orcas, and why it was still worth it when they didn’t turn up.
Sea otters, elephant seals and dune buggies on the California coast road, and the stops worth leaving time for.
The Patagonian sea lions that hang around the riverside in downtown Valdivia, right in the middle of the city.
Chalk cliffs, seabirds and coastal walks on the Yorkshire coast, and how to plan a day there.
We visited here quite a few years ago, but the experience was amazing. Unfortunately no photos were allowed!
Beaks & feathers
We were greeted by a Crested Caracara while enjoying a wine lunch!
Where to see penguins in Chile, on a boat trip out to the islets off Punihuil on Chiloé Island.
Saddle & hooves
Embrace your inner cowboy and riding horses through the Historic Reesor Ranch in Canada.
Our favourite activity in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca (and maybe of the holiday!)
Claws & paws
Meeting Xing Qiu and Yi Lan in their bamboo forest, and how to fit the pandas into a day at the zoo.
Why we hired a guide for Costa Rica’s best-known park, and the sloths he found before we’d even reached the gates.
Surfing, bear watching and the rest of what this end-of-the-road town on Vancouver Island does well.
Explore Macau from Hong Kong and enjoy the Giant Pandas at the pavilion.
Pouches & pockets
Kangaroos come down onto one of Australia’s whitest beaches, we weren’t lucky enough – but hopefully you are!
How to find Quokkas on Rottnest Island while on a bike. The world’s happiest rodent.
Day trip from Adelaide to see koalas, kangaroos, wallabies (and also some sea lions).
Fingers, Fins, Feathers & Friends
Tigers, Orangutang, Monkeys, Giraffes, you name it! The whole gang is in town.
National park status and conservation designations protect the places. Visitors protect the animals within them, or don’t. The gap between the two comes down to the choices each of us makes on the day, and it matters more than most people realise before they arrive.
Sticking to this is easier in principle than in practice, especially when a place has gone viral and the crowd around you is doing exactly what you know you shouldn’t. Tom saw this twice on his travels in south-east Australia. At the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island, near Melbourne, crowds left the walkways to photograph the penguins and trampled near their burrows. On Maria Island in Tasmania, which has become the place to see wombats on social media, he found many visitors paying little attention to the guidelines. Both were a reminder that a conservation designation doesn’t guarantee people will behave.
No, and any tour company that guarantees a sighting is either overpromising or managing the animals in a way that compromises their welfare. What you can do is choose the right season, place and guide to give yourself the best chance. We once spent two days sea kayaking in the San Juan Islands hoping to see orcas, and they never came past. It was disappointing, but that's nature, and the kayaking was wonderful anyway.
For season-specific experiences with limited places, such as gorilla trekking permits, turtle nesting tours and safari lodges in peak migration, book as early as you can, often months ahead. For national park walks, coastal boat trips and city wildlife, a few weeks ahead is usually enough outside peak season. If the wildlife is the reason for the trip, make it your first booking.
Yes. The UK has some of the best seabird colonies in Europe, with puffins nesting on cliffs and islands around the coast in late spring and early summer. Seal colonies, red deer and coastal birdlife are all within a weekend's reach of most of the country, so a short break built around one coastal walk and one boat trip works well.
Many are, if you choose carefully. National park walks, coastal wildlife viewing, gardens and boat trips through wildlife-rich waterways all suit younger children. Long sea crossings, very early starts with strict rules and long quiet waits for night-time animals are better saved for older children and teenagers.
The wildlife encounters we still talk about weren't always the ones we planned for. Three sloths by the side of the road, sea lions in the middle of a city, a morning on the water when the orcas never came but the islands were beautiful anyway.
So plan for the season, choose a guide you trust and pick an experience that's worth having whatever turns up. When you've found your wildlife window, head to Stage 3 of the Roadmap to fit your dates around it.
Happy spotting, and keep your distance.