by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Dipping The White-Headed Vulture On The R27
After weeks of waking up early, we decided to sleep in, only for me to wake up, check my phone, and see that a White-Headed Vulture was seen and photographed about an hour earlier along the R27, a short way outside Ganzekraal. The Drive to The West Coast The weather was brooding, with dark clouds…
Chasing Raptors at Helderberg Nature Reserve
I recently went through to Helderberg Nature Reserve with Monique to do some birding and help her grow her life list. We went through quite early in the morning, and it was my first birding visit to the reserve in a while. Since the pine plantations were cut down a few years ago I haven’t…
Continuing The Lucky Streak
While success in birding can often be tied to dedication, there is no way of getting around the fact that it also includes a lot of luck. You can be visit a local patch regularly for a vast number of hours, but there is still the possibility that the second you leave, an unbelievably rare…
Snowy Egret at Black River – 9 June 2015
Last night (8 June) I was running through my Facebook news feed when I saw a post made to the Wider Cape Town Birders Challenge group about an unusual Egret sighting that happened along Black River, just off the M5 near Cape Town. The post, made by Dominic Rollinson didn’t garner too much attention at…
A Weekend of Raptors
The week started out less than great, on the night of my previous blog post, my car was broken into – drivers side window smashed and my GPS stolen, while I somehow never heard the alarm go off. This was followed by a rush to get a new window installed prior to taking my car…
Hightlights of 2013 – Birding and Photography
I can’t even remember when last I made a blog post, and quite frankly it’s inexcusable, as I have had many pretty good days out since my last update. However, I figured that I should make at least one post to end of the year. This year has been far from great, on almost all…
Storm Chasing Adventures
Browse All Storm Chasing Blogs
Chasing Dusk: A Guide To Predicting and Photographing Sunsets
Nothing brings a landscape to life quite like phenomenal lighting. Sunset photography is popular, and sometimes just being in the right place at the right time will give you the biggest advantage in creating the photograph you’ve been envisioning. Thankfully being in the right place at the right time isn’t just a result of luck….
Chasing Lightning in Cape Town 12 & 13 February
Despite being in the middle of a water crisis, the Cape Town area got a few millimeters of rain relief this week with the arrival of some rare thunderstorms to the area. I’d been watching the model runs for a few weeks, and they had repeatedly shown some interesting developments into the third week of…
Chasing Snow in Ceres – 16 July 2017
The weather forecasts for the past week had been showing a strong cold front pushing through the Western Cape on Saturday evening into Sunday morning. Of particular interest with this front was the forecasted freezing levels, which suggested that we may be in for a good snow event across parts of the country. With the…
Chasing Lightning In The Cape
Some people may not be aware, but before birding came into my life I was heavily invested in storm chasing and in 2009 I founded the country’s first dedicated storm chasing community website. My active involvement in storm chasing and tracking may have diminished slightly over the years, but you can bet that if there’s…
Chasing Fires in Somerset West (3 January 2017)
At lunch time on Tuesday I left the house to pick up my girlfriend, but as I opened the front door I was greeted with flames whipping into the air on top of Rome Glen, which is just about 2 kilometers to my east. Fires are usually pretty common in summer around the area, but…
Chasing Mammatus and Other Local Adventures
I woke up on Sunday morning with Monique doing a “Women’s Walk” in Cape Town, and thus had the morning to myself and had planned to head through to Kogelbay and try some surf photography again. The swell forecast was good and the surface wind was forecast as a moderate South Easter, usually good for…
