As well as a well travelled motorcycle tourer I am also an avid bird watcher (not a twitcher though),

Can anyone recommend some good areas and or locations to go bird watching in Hungary?

Doug

I know where there is a damn irritating Woodpecker! .... still!

I live in a town and have a far greater variety of birds visiting my garden here than I ever saw when I lived in the counrtyside in the UK.

Very popular in this neck of the woods in the Bukk and Matra hills. Also the Hortobagy is a fantastic place to bird watch.

Kis Balaton

That's one of the things I love about living just over the border in Transylvania, the diversity of birds in the courtyard and getting to know them. Only this weekend I saw the ubiquitous sparrow, blackbirds, marsh tits, great tits, nuthatches, redstarts, jays, a buzzard (not actually in the courtyard that one, circling overhead) and at one point something bright yellow screeched past which I thought at the time might be some kind of escaped pet. I looked it up online, based on the two-second view of it I had and bird call recordings and I'm pretty certain it was a goldern oriole! Driving back to the capital the fields were packed with hundreds of storks.

If you wanted to combine biking and bird watching, you could bike across Hungary and Romania to the Danube Delta, which I'm told is particularly rich in birdlife.

We live in Tolna County and see all those birds in our garden (except the Stork) and also the White Tailed Eagle soaring above us and landing in the field behind. I regularly see one low down over the fields on the route 65 towards Tamasi.

There does not seem to be any Storks in this area, which is sad as I was told they are considered good luck.

We have had a nest of Great Tits in our letter box on our gate. She managed to raise 8 chicks and they fledged last week. We now see them in our pear tree.

We also have Siskins,the traditional Robin,thrushes,starlings (raiding our Cherry Tree), Bee Eaters, Thrush Nightingale (which sings in the night and day) and of course the Cuckoo. The call of the Golden Oriole is really distinctive.

Brian has seen another bird up in our field but we have yet to identify it.

This is quite surprising as we have lots here, in fact each town and village has at least one stork nest atop a telephone pole. They clearly come to the same nest each year, generation after generation

You could do worst than taking in Lake Tisza, the North end of the lake is considered to be one of the most important wildfowl reserves in Europe Plenty of other stuff out here in the east too and you are also just an hours ride away from the centre of the Hortobagy national park

Lake Tizra .... can't remember seeing much wildfowl life there when I cycled around it 2 years ago! Maybe the uncomfortable bike saddle distracted my attention!

It is always better to get closer and hire a boat, but the north end of the lake is spectacular... The southern end is all about watersports and jet skis and rare wildfowl are not the best of bed fellows

Here's just some of the stuff you can find in and about the Tisza/Hortobagy region http://www.hungarianbirdwatching.com...e%20Tisza.html

I had to go past Kis Balaton today so I attempted to take a look. I was on the Zalakomár to Sármellék road and tried 2 turnings for the lake. The first one had a small car park which was free but we could not see how to get to the lake. There was a bridge blocked off with a sort of cross made of armco and a barrier which was up on the road to said bridge. The other road was obviously a proper access for the lake but you had to pay for parking. Is there a way to get near the lake without paying?

My brother-in-law has a sort of skiff and we did go round the lake in two of them but still didn't see any birds but we did see two naked couples in a kayak!

Sounds like it, we saw loads of them in Bulgaria but only two here, I love their song, very distinctive.

Go from Zalaszabar to Zalavar, across the road with all the weeping willows. Park just past the bridge and you can walk or cycle down either side of the lake.

Ah, I see, there's a bridge over part of the lake, thanks RH.