by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
Enjoy My Content?
Consider signing up for my newsletter, and you’ll get the latest adventures delivered directly to your email.
Bird Outings & Twitches
The Last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō – A Final Song
This is no doubt the most depressing piece I have ever written, and although my fingers press against the keys in an array of existential dread and carnivorous guilt, I feel as though the expression of thought through word is only fitting. Not as an undeserved relief to myself, but as tribute to what was…
Knob-Billed Duck at Strandfontein Sewage Works
Earlier this past week we twitched the African Crake at Strandfontein, only to get home and receive another rare bird alert minutes later saying that a Knob-Billed Duck had been spotted just a couple hundred meters away from the Crake. The report came in the late afternoon and we wouldn’t be able to make it…
A Weekend in McGregor
After several months of mechanics, my car finally gave a code on a diagnostic scanner and on Thursday morning I found myself with a car that had a cleaned throttle body – I was hesitant that this would be the fix, but I was hoping. My girlfriend has been in McGregor for a few weeks,…
Birding The Helderberg – Macassar, Vergenoegd and Paardevlei
It was once again time for the monthly Somerset West Bird Club outing, and the weather was not looking kind at first light. The forecast wasn’t great and I wasn’t expecting much, and having woken up with a sore ankle, I was weighing whether I should go or not. At 7:40 I contacted Rose Mills…
Birding at Rooi Els and Bettys Bay
Somerset West Bird Club Outing – Rooi Els and Betty’s Bay (16 March 2013) The day started as any good day of birding does, by waking up far too early. The alarms were set for 5:00, allowing us 45 minutes to wake up, get ready and to grab some snacks/breakfast and put in petrol. Cathryn,…
Chasing Targets – Rooi Els, Rooisand and Elgin
With my provincial list now requiring me to travel a fair amount in order to see new birds, and petrol being at near all time highs, this past weekend saw Monique and myself set some fairly easy target birds for her list. Having just started listing in February of this year, she still has a…
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…
