Dear Tweeters,

As indicated in an earlier post, I am planning? a trip to India for later this summer. It's just a sideline to the?main trip to Bhutan, but my friend and I have a week or so to bird in India, and we are trying to line up a birding guide.

I wish there was some sort of vetting or rating website where one could check up on the reputations of bird-guiding services, sort of like Consumers Reports--the gold standard in my opinion--or Tripadvisor. The thing I like about CR is that they don't accept any advertising, so it's about as objective as possible. Surfbirds has some info on birding guides, but they take advertising, so there is always the possibility of conflict of interest.

Tripadvisor occasionally has a side-mention of a guide service, but birding is still a small enough niche that there isn't any obvious answer to the questions one might have about tour operators--especially internationally.

Any ideas?

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch