Wildseer

A great hornbill in flight against a deep blue sky, wings spread, its yellow casque and bill catching the light beside a fruiting branch

A pocket field guide to the world’s wildlife

Most travel writing tells you a place has abundant wildlife and leaves it there. Wildseer tells you which animal, which valley or reef, which month, and how likely you actually are to see it. Every entry is a real record checked against a database rather than a memory, with an honest likelihood attached, and where a species is probably already gone we say so rather than quietly dropping it.

It is written for the traveller who books the dawn boat rather than the lie-in. Not an expert, but not satisfied with monkeys and elephants either.

Nothing here is sponsored. No operator can buy a place on this site and none ever will.

Two countries so far: Thailand and Sri Lanka

Thailand came first and is covered in full: 517 species across every group, from the Indochinese tiger down to the leeches, tied to fifteen specific places. Sri Lanka followed, with 397 species across twenty-eight places, including the densest leopard population recorded anywhere and the largest gathering of wild elephants in Asia. Between them that is 684 species and 2,873 individual records.

Browse Thailand by group

Read the full guide to wildlife in Thailand, or start with wildlife in Sri Lanka

Going somewhere specific?

Park and island guides list what is genuinely present at that one place, not what is present in the country.

Places

Going in a particular month?

Seasons matter more than most guides admit. On the Andaman coast the diving season and the monsoon are opposites. In the forest, the dry months concentrate mammals at water while the green months belong to frogs and insects. These pages are built from the same records, filtered to what is actually around.

How this is put together

Every species sits in a structured record: where to look, which months, and an honest likelihood running from Common down to Ultra rare. Ultra rare means a once-in-a-lifetime record, not a famous animal. Nothing is invented to fill a page, and if a group looks thin it is because the evidence is thin.

The guide also records loss. The largetooth sawfish and the masked finfoot are both listed for Thailand and both are very likely gone. A field guide that quietly drops them tells you the sea is richer than it is.

Every photograph is licensed for reuse and credited, with the full list at image credits.

What is coming

Region by region, with the next country already being scoped. Global species pages, printable checklists, and reverse lookups for the question people actually ask, which is not what lives in Thailand but where in the world can I see a manta ray.

Image credits, licences, and how each image was cropped

Square thumbnails are cropped from the original. Wide banner images are cropped to a band. Other images are resized only. No other changes have been made.

Square thumbnails are cropped from the original. Wide banner images are cropped to a band. Other images are resized only. No other changes have been made.