by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Birding at Strandfontein Sewage Works and Rondevlei – 17 June 2012
To top off an already busy weekend of birding I decided on Saturday night that I would wake up early, and if weather permitting, head to the Strandfontein Sewage Works and Rondevlei Bird Sanctuary. At around 8:15am I looked at the weather via some webcams in Cape Town and Muizenberg and decided I may as…
Road To 300 – Black-Bellied Starling in Gordon’s Bay (294)
Monday morning started like any other, in the office working. But at around 9pm or so I got a Facebook message from a friend. It was a collection of cell phone images of a Starling that was outside her house. She said that it looked like a Red-Winged Starling but without the red under the…
The Return of the Tawny
For those reading with the intention of only hearing about the Tawny sighting, you can scroll down to Tuesday 25 September. Wednesday – 19 September 2012 Another lunch time meet up with Tertius Gous at the Helderberg Nature Reserve started off with a sighting of a Juvenile Jackal Buzzard in close proximity on the drive…
The Buzzard Problem – Differentiating Steppe, Jackal and Forest Buzzards
Truth be told, I first started writing this article over a year ago, and it was a lot more bloated than this piece is. Over the past several years, I took a particular interest in raptors, and specifically Buzzards, more than likely because they were the birds that I came across most often in the…
Autumn at Kirstenbosch Gardens
After a night of little sleep, I woke up to a sunny Autumn day in April and with my girlfriend Monique feeling a bit under the weather I hoped to try and makes things a bit better by planning a spontaneous mission. I opened up Google maps and began looking at possible destinations that would…
What A Bird! Finding the Crested Honey Buzzard
It started out like almost any other Saturday, with the exception of a European Roller being located just outside of Stellenbosch. Milli and myself were excited for the opportunity for a new lifer (and one that had evaded me for far too long given its annual appearance in the province). After a 10-minute drive, we…
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…
