This is the Tripbase Award for best bird watching blogs. The hobby can involve exotic locations and attracts a great deal of passion from around the globe - for this we felt it deserved its own travel award category, especially given the high-quality sites which support it (as you will see from our winners below).

Our judges were compelled to choose the blogs we felt were as much about the idea of bird watching travel as they were about the birds themselves. Plenty of blogs cover the mating call of the grebe in extreme detail, but the team sought out how to go about finding where the grebe might be mating, how to get there, where to stay when you arrive and what else to do while you are there - collectively, the list below is a fantastic portal into the hobby and no aspect is left uncovered, forming a practical guide of sorts for both casual and hardcore bird watchers alike.

Without further ado, here are the award winners which were whittled down from a long list of many. As a point of note, a number of these have regularly updated Twitter feeds - fitting and entirely useful given their subject matter.