Some bucket-list trips involve beaches. Ours involved a bird with ear tufts and a bad attitude toward eye contact. Welcome to Kikinda, the self-appointed “Owl Capital of the World,” a title nobody voted on, but nobody’s arguing with either.
Hundreds of Long-eared Owls roosting in one small northern Serbian town? We were sold before we even finished reading the sentence, but now that we’ve actually made the pilgrimage, we’ve got some things we wish someone had told us before we packed our bags.
There’s no shortage of owl trivia online: plenty of “blogging birders” have covered the feathers-and-facts side of things. What they’ve skipped is the practical stuff: the everyday-traveler survival guide.
So let’s fix that, starting with how we even got here.
Our Journey to the Owl Capital of the World
Grab a coffee; we’ve got some insider truths and a few laughs to share before we get to the owls themselves.
The whole adventure kicked off in Barcelona, where we snagged a suspiciously cheap flight on Skyscanner for $42 per person, checked bag included, bound for Belgrade. Third trip to Belgrade for us, and the city still delivered the goods.
Fresh off the plane, intui.travel whisked us straight to a really nice apartment rental smack in the city center.
Belgrade decided to greet us with the year’s biggest snowstorm, which we powered through on a stroll down Knez Mihailova Street before gawking at the historic Belgrade Fortress. Naturally, we also ate our way through Serbian cuisine in Skadarlija, the city’s Bohemian Quarter.
First time in Belgrade? Here are a couple of tours worth your time.
Take a Guided Tour
A good guide turns “huh, that’s a building” into an actual story. These three tours give you a solid foundation of the city, plus enough confidence to wander off and explore on your own afterward.
- 😋 Go on a Food Tour: Discover Belgrade’s culture through food on this guided walking tour. Sample Serbian delights, sip rakija, and learn local history and traditions.
- 🔨 Learn About Communism: Embark on this guided tour exploring Serbia’s communist era. Visit historic sites, hear legends, and discover the intriguing legacy of Tito’s leadership.
- 🚢 Take a Sunset Cruise: Enjoy this 1.5-hour cruise in Belgrade! Sail the Danube and Sava rivers, soak in city views, and hear fascinating commentary.
On to Kikinda to See Long-eared Owls!
Back to Nikola Tesla International Airport we went, where we picked up a rental car for three nights: one in Kikinda, two in Novi Sad. Total damage on the car? A whopping USD 35 for the whole stretch ($12 a day) thanks to Discover Cars. Basically a rounding error.
Kikinda sits about two hours from the airport, and the drive is a lesson in geometry: flat, flatter, flattest. Unlike the mountainous south, northern Serbia is all Vojvodina region: big sky, bigger fields.
Vojvodina sits in the Pannonian Basin, which is science-speak for “wide open and proud of it.” It reminded us of Illinois, endless flat farmland stretching to the horizon with barely a hill to break it up. Turns out that’s a five-star buffet for birds of prey: we counted dozens on the drive to Kikinda, practically one per mile.
We rolled into town on January 12 expecting a small stampede of binocular-toting wildlife nerds. Instead: dead quiet, even at peak owl migration. Our accommodation, Apartman Vila Milica, more than made up for it: spotless, roomy, and hosted by an absolute gem of a host. We dropped our bags and got ready to explore.
🏨 Apartman Vila Milica > Check Availability
💰 Budget-savvy Tip: just around the corner from the apartment sits a bakery slinging the freshest chocolate-filled donuts in town. Consider your breakfast problem solved.
Tap Water is Hazardous
Here’s the part of the trip nobody warns you about. Kikinda sits inside Vojvodina, the province holding the unfortunate title of Serbia’s most toxic water supply.
Locals have been battling for clean water for more than two decades, and we’re not just talking taste or clarity here. Testing has turned up genuinely alarming stuff in the tap water: carcinogens and bacteria among them, including traces of arsenic, ammonia, iron, and fecal matter.
And here’s a genuinely wild stat: only 10% of Serbia’s wastewater gets treated. The other 90% heads right back into the rivers, which explains an awful lot about the ammonia, bacteria, and fecal matter showing up in the municipal supply.
Does Kikinda Have Safe Drinking Water
The short version: Kikinda’s tap water carries a heavy sulfur smell and leaves an oily film behind.
It gets weirder: there’s documented evidence of locals lighting their own tap water on fire thanks to high methane content. Not exactly a party trick you want to test yourself.
We took one look at that glass and decided even hand-washing felt optimistic. Between the sketchy bathing situation and zero clarity on how restaurants handle their water, one night in Kikinda felt like exactly the right amount.
How to Handle the Water Situation
First things first: it doesn’t matter which hotel you book; the water story stays the same everywhere.
Even the top-rated hotels in town get dinged for it in reviews. Lucky for us, our host stocked a welcome package of bottled water to get us through, and the apartment’s kitchen let us handle our own meals.
Second, we travel with a travel-sized reverse osmosis filter for exactly these situations. No filter? Stock up on bottled water, though given the two-decade-long crisis, it’s oddly pricey for something so basic.
While wandering around, we passed a community bulletin board listing recent deaths, and braced ourselves for grim water-crisis math.
Instead, nearly every name belonged to someone in their late 80s or 90s. We had a good laugh about it: maybe the water’s not quite as villainous as we’d feared.
Jokes aside, Belgrade’s streets are lined with Porsches, Mercedes, and BMWs, largely fueled by money flowing in from Russia; this is not a poor country. Which makes the sluggish political response to the water crisis all the more baffling.
Something tells us it’d get fixed overnight if the politicians in question had to fill their own glasses from the tap.
What to Bring to Kikinda
Seasoned birdwatchers already know their daypack by heart. For the rest of us mere mortals, here’s a friendly packing list for an owl safari.
Rule number one: bring your warmest outdoor gear and something to help you actually see the owls. Kikinda winter evenings are brutal, and you’ll want to linger outside as long as possible watching them swoop across the square.
Planning a long night of owl-watching? Pack a heat source so the cold doesn’t chase you inside early, especially if you’ve only budgeted one night in town.
The photo above shows the standard viewing experience pretty well: owls parked way up in the high branches. A set of travel-sized low-light binoculars and a small, powerful camera tucked into your birding field bag will make your life a lot easier.
The Colder the Better
Around Kikinda, there’s a saying: colder is better. Turns out that’s not just local folklore; colder air actually transmits sound more efficiently, and owls hunt almost entirely by ear.
As air density rises in the cold, sound waves travel more efficiently, a phenomenon called higher sound conductivity, and owls take full advantage of it.
An owl’s facial disc and lopsided ear placement are basically built for this exact weather, letting them pinpoint prey with impressive precision in the cold.
January brings long nights and crisp air, which lines up perfectly with the nocturnal habits of long-eared owls. Head out in the late afternoon and evening for your best shot at a sighting.
Worth noting: January isn’t the only game in town. December and February are solid shoulder-season options too, with owls still active and plenty of interesting behavior to catch.
Locate the Owls – Be Careful Who You Ask
There’s a running joke among visitors here, and we lived it firsthand: ask a local about the owls and brace for a blank stare, like you just asked about Bigfoot.
Case in point: a birder who knew owls typically arrive in September showed up in November and asked a vendor in the square about them. The vendor shrugged him off, “Autumn’s too warm, I haven’t seen any, they aren’t here yet.” Undeterred, he wandered into the square anyway and found the trees absolutely stacked with long-eared owls.
Moral of the story: don’t let a shrugging local talk you out of looking up. Plenty of townsfolk have simply gotten used to tuning out the owls roosting right over their heads.
Know Where to Look
We spent our first stretch in Kikinda circling the town’s edges, squinting up into quiet park trees. Then our host set us straight: “Yes, the owls are here, in the city center.”
For a bird with a reputation for being elusive, these owls make it shockingly easy. Here’s the whole system:
- Visit the Serbian Orthodox Church at the center of Kikinda.
- Identify the coniferous trees surrounding the square.
- Examine the ground and proceed to the tree with the most owl droppings underneath.
- Look up.
That’s genuinely the whole method.
Be Sure to See the Other Highlights
Owls sleep through the day, which leaves you a whole window to fill before nightfall wakes them back up. Kikinda’s got a handful of worthy stops to fill that gap.
Kikinda National Museum
The Kikinda National Museum covers archaeology, local history, and natural history — but the real star is “Kika,” a mammoth skeleton dug up in the region. With about 90% of its bones intact, it’s one of the best-preserved mammoth specimens in the world, and genuinely a big deal for a town this size.
Generala Drapsina Street
Often called Serbia’s most beautiful street — and a nod on international “most beautiful streets” lists too — Generala Drapsina Street is worth a slow stroll or drive beneath its tree-lined canopy.
Terra Museum
Kikinda takes its sculpture seriously. Each July, the Terra Museum hosts the International Symposium Terra, and in winter you can pop in to browse its collection of nearly 1,000 terracotta sculptures.
Terra-cotta gets most of the glory here, but there’s a great story about the time locals protested a certain phallic-looking owl statue at the city’s entrance.
Spomenik Sculpture Tour
Scattered across former Yugoslavia, spomeniks are monuments that tend to fly under the radar simply because there’s rarely much signage explaining them. These war memorials are worth reading up on before you go.
Kikinda has a few of its own worth tracking down during your owl trip. The Spomenik Database is a handy tool for planning stops around Serbia.
Download a Bird App
Serbia’s flat, open terrain is basically an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds of prey hunting small mammals. Add in its spot at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, and you’ve got a prime layover for migratory birds moving between breeding and wintering grounds.
The Belgrade-to-Kikinda drive alone is a birding highlight reel: kestrels, hawks, Golden Eagles, and Common Buzzards all made appearances. No exaggeration: there’s a bird of prey on a fence or tree seemingly every few miles.
Download the free Merlin Bird app so you can actually identify what’s staring back at you.
Parking Around Kikinda
Parking is only free on Sundays. There’s an SMS pay-to-park system with instructions online in a few languages, and if your SIM card isn’t cooperating, the service counter at Vojvode Putnika Street 4 has you covered.
If you walk into a building that looks suspiciously like a farmers’ market, congratulations, you’ve found the right spot. A friendly local helped us track down our all-day parking pass in exactly that building.
Every year, Kikinda quietly becomes the epicenter of long-eared owl migration, and every year it stays weirdly under the radar. Our advice: go now, while it’s still this peaceful, because a town with owls, a mammoth, and this much charm won’t stay a secret forever.
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