Mark Van Beirs

Mark Van Beirs lives with his partner Kathleen and daughter Caroline near Ghent, Belgium and has guided a truly remarkable number of tours for Birdquest.

Born and raised in Ghent, Mark trained as a forester but let his passion for birds distract him from a life spent with trees. He started travelling abroad in search of birds at a young age, firstly all over Europe but soon throughout the world. His early career included a spell in a travel agency and fifteen months working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos and in the Amazonian rainforest of Ecuador before he became one of Birdquest’s longest-serving and best-respected leaders.

His impressive fluency in six languages and invariably cheerful manner allow him to travel with ease anywhere on earth and he has now visited over 120 countries!

Mark has a very wide-ranging knowledge of birds, with an extraordinary depth and worldwide level of interest, so that he now feels at home almost anywhere on the planet. He has particular expertise in New Guinea (both West Papua and Papua New Guinea, even including remote satellite islands like the Bismark and D’Entrecasteaux archipelagos, Manus and Kofiau) and the Solomon Islands, all areas where he has more experience than any other Birdquest leader, Australia, the Caribbean Islands (all the Greater and the Lesser Antilles plus Trinidad), Mexico, Central Asia and Mongolia. Even this impressive list is not exhaustive as he has also spent years in total in the field in both South America and Africa.

Mark has now observed well over 9000 species of birds, a remarkable achievement even for such a well-travelled bird tour leader, but he also has a passion for watching mammals of all kinds and at night likes to indulge in stargazing.