Sam Veasna Conservation Tours

Sam Veasna Conservation Tours is a birding and wildlife tour operator running community-based trips to protected sites across Cambodia. Sam Veasna Conservation Tours takes travellers deep into Cambodia's Northern Plains, an expanse of dry dipterocarp forest, seasonal wetlands and grassland that holds the last wild populations of some of Southeast Asia's rarest birds. The organisation is named for Sam Veasna, a Cambodian naturalist who died of malaria at 33 while surveying these same plains for the kouprey, and it now manages exclusive access to Wildlife Conservation Society sites across the country, guided by local, English-speaking bird guides who know this landscape intimately.

The flagship trip heads to Tmatboey, a village inside Kulen Promtep Wildlife Sanctuary and the only known site where both the Giant Ibis and White-shouldered Ibis reliably breed. Other routes take in the Bengal Florican grasslands, the Prek Toal waterbird colony on the Tonle Sap, and the Chhep Vulture Restaurant, where three critically endangered vulture species are fed. A conservation contribution of USD$10 per day trip, or $30 overnight, goes straight into community development in the villages these birds depend on, and since 2002, both ibis populations have risen.