Developing bird watching ecotourism combined with education and natural conservation

Abstract. Bird watching ecotourism is highly-responsible and educative kind of nature tourism which helps conserve natural environment and culture values of the local area, develop community and bring about remarkable economic benefits. Birds are seen everywhere but especially found with many species in nature reserves and national parks. There are 30 National Parks, 67 Nature Reserves, more than 50 Bird Sanctuaries in Vietnam, and more 16 Marine Protected Area are planned to be established until 2015, which has great potentials to develop bird watching ecotourism. In order to develop this tourism model in nature reserve, it is necessary to improve personnel’s capability and to set up database for identifying wild birds in each area. Conserving precious and specific bird species, characteristic communities for habitats plays an important role in attracting tourists toVietnam for bird watching. Some database in analyzing bioacoustics in some specific wind season tropical forests inVietnam are presented in this paper such as Orange-bellied leafbird, Silver-eared mesia and Indian cuckoo.Keywords: ecotourism, bird watching, nature reserve, bioacoustics.