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812 species recorded
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10 hornbills in one country
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Max 6 guests per guide
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20 years in the field
Why Malaysia
A hundred and thirty million years of practice
Tropical forest does not whisper. It shrieks, drums, buzzes and drips. These rainforests are older than the Amazon and stacked so tightly that you can be watching waders on a mudflat over breakfast roti canai, and be among laughingthrushes in cloud forest by mid-afternoon.
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The birds you come for
Names worth learning twice
Malay · English
Our guides
Meet the team
“Nine lifers before breakfast, and the best kopi-o of the trip after.”
We hear the bird before you see the branch move
Ashwings is a small team of Malaysian guides who grew up on these trails. Between us: two decades of guiding across the Peninsula and Borneo, international groups led, young guides trained, and long relationships with the Orang Asli and kampung communities who open the doors no booking site can. On a good morning your guide will name nine calls before anyone has raised binoculars.
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Tours & trips
Open for booking
Small groups, honest pacing. Every trip can be run privately on your own dates.
Where we bird
Seven Malaysian mornings
Tap a site to filter
Out with us
Four-wheel drives, muddy boots, very good company
Groups from Malaysia, Singapore, Europe and India — students, listers, photographers, and people who had never held binoculars before that week.
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Not only birds
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Wildlife & night trips
Then the forest changes shift
At dusk the siamang stop calling and the frogs take over. A night walk on an old logging road turns up civets, flying squirrels, scops owls, tarantulas and, on a good night, something nobody expected. Most birding trips here carry a night session without touching the next dawn.
People of the forest
The forest has neighbours, and we bird with them
Orang Asli trackers — Jakun, Semai, Temiar — read this forest in a way no field guide covers. Where a trip passes their land we walk with them, eat where they eat, and the fee goes to the village rather than through us. Expect handwoven rattan, river crossings by longboat, and a very different set of bird names.
Community-guided walks on Belum-Temengor and Tasik Chini itineraries · kampung homestay nights · boatmen and cooks hired locally, always.
Heritage & culture
Heritage & culture trips
Not every trip we run is about birds
The country that holds the oldest rainforest on earth also holds two UNESCO port cities, a limestone valley with the region’s oldest human remains, and kampung crafts still made by hand. We run these as trips in their own right, or as the slow days between forest mornings.
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India, in the dry season
See the India trips
Tigers at the water, skimmers on the sandbar
Once the heat pushes everything to water, the dry deciduous forest becomes the easiest place on earth to watch big mammals behave normally. We run two Indian trips each winter with the same co-guide: one built around Ranthambore and a boat on the Chambal, one around Mughal Agra and the Keoladeo wetlands.
Ranthambore
Open jeeps at first light. Tiger, Sloth Bear, Grey Langur, Ruddy Mongoose, Indian Grey Hornbill.
The Chambal
A flat-bottomed boat, gharial on the bank, Indian Skimmer and Great Thick-knee on the sand.
Agra & Keoladeo
Mughal stone in the mornings, Black-necked Stork and 180 species of waterbird in the afternoons.
The days in between
Birding mornings leave the afternoons free
Dawn is the serious part of the day. After that, on a longer trip, we will happily build in the rest of the country — waterfalls, caves, a river, a mangrove boat, and whatever the durian season is doing. Tell us on the enquiry form and it goes in the itinerary.
Granite falls, Langkawi — a swim before the drive back.
Into the limestone gorge, looking for swiftlets and bats.
The rapids on the Kampar, for groups who ask for them.
Lunch at the edge of the paddy, watching for bitterns.
From the trail
Gallery
Photographs from our trips
Beyond Malaysia
A few trips further out each year
Run with guides we have birded alongside for a decade.
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Enquire
We stood still for twenty minutes and the forest simply carried on around us. Our guide named every call before we found the bird.
Hannah W. · Fraser’s Hill, 2025
Trip reports
What the days actually look like
Written up the week they happened — the weather, the walking, the long quiet stretches and what turned up. The honest version, not the brochure.