Get Ready for Birding and Wildlife Watching Tours

You have visions of strutting sage grouse dancing in your head. When you sleep, rivers of wildebeests stream through your dreams. You've seen the pictures of howler monkeys in the trees over the Amazon River, and a little voice is telling you: This you gotta see for yourself!

If you fit this description, you've got the wildlife-watching bug, and nothing but days filled with birds and beasts will cure what ails you. If so, you're in luck, because the range of guided wildlife-watching trips is as varied as the animal kingdom itself. There are the obvious marquee events—whale-watching off Baja California, witnessing 5,000 snow geese descend on the coastal marshes, going eyeball-to-eyeball with Galapagos tortoises. But there are plenty of less exotic wildlife experiences that can be no less thrilling. How about paddling through the inky black Great Dismal Swamp as breeding barred owls hoot it up so loud you can't hear your own voice? Or standing atop the Goshute Mountains in Nevada as a thousand hawks wing by?

Going with a guide will put you where the wild lives are. Guides know which ridgetops afford the best views of mountain caribou in the Canadian Rockies. They know how the migrating warblers respond to changes in local weather patterns. And, if you pick your guides carefully, they'll have a treasure trove of natural history knowledge that you'd never be able to glean from a guidebook.

But first, you have to decide: Which creatures, great or small, are you going after?