by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
An Escape To Montagu
It’s been three years since my last post and twelve years since my first on this blog. It’s hard to believe that so many years have passed. Still, the truth is Covid lockdowns, and a world of chaos didn’t bode well for recreational productivity. I’ve spent much of the last several years grappling with the…
Twitching The Wattled Lapwing At Paardevlei
It’s been a busy last few weeks in the Cape with rarities, and with several provincial lifers for me all found relatively close, Milli and I found the time to get outside and find some of these birds. The elephant in the room is, of course, the fact that my last twitching post was made…
Pelagic Birding – A Day At Sea (21 April 2013)
Cathryn and I were lucky enough to be spending the day headed out to sea for some pelagic birding with Zest for Birds. We were both extremely excited to be introduced to a world that we had not yet experienced, a world of Petrels, Skuas, Albatrosses and more. It was up and at ’em at…
A Black Tern Adventure Near Fisherhaven
A week after we got the Wattled Lapwing at Paardevlei we set off to chase another rarity, a Black Tern that was found around the coast near Fisherhaven. The trip is relatively short from here, about 45 minutes to an hour. After a relatively uneventful drive, we arrived at the location pin. Well, the closest…
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…
Road To 300 – Parasitic Jaeger (291), Sabine’s Gull (292), Atlantic Yellow-Nosed Albatross (293)
This past week I had made plans with Monique, for us to try tick the Lemon Doves at Kirstenbosch Gardens and then head down to Mouille Point in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a Sabine’s Gull over the ocean. On the Friday I was then given a great opportunity to attend a pelagic…
Storm Chasing Adventures
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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…
