by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
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,…
Strandfontein Birding Trip – 09 March 2025
After an unsuccessful chase of the Long-Crested Eagle that was seen near Klapmuts, Milli and I woke up to morning load shedding, a good time to go out and do some birding! Although I’ve been to Strandfontein dozens of times, Milli had only been a few – and she still had some fairly easy species…
My Top 10 Twitches and Rare Bird Discoveries
In this blog post I’m going to run through my most memorable twitches and rare bird discovers while out in the field. Some because of the adventure behind it, others because of the bird itself. My first twitch was in early 2012, and in that time I’ve been lucky enough to see many more special…
Differentiating Little Egret and Snowy Egret
In South Africa we encounter countless amounts of Little Egrets out in the field. They are a common bird which are typically found in shallow areas of water, both salt and fresh water. When compared to our other Egrets; it’s a fairly straight forward identification process. With that said, when one throws into the mix…
Camping Trip – Day 1 (Klondyke Farm)
With the recent long weekend, I made plans with my friend Andrew to go on a bit of a camping trip. I was given the challenge of planning the route and finding the best places to camp. Initially I spent about a week looking for locations, everything from the Cedarberg to the Tankwa Karoo. In…
A Twitch Bus Adventure – The Striped Crake Heartache (Part 2)
After our success twitch of the Malagasy Pond Heron the day before, we were feeling confident in our next target; that of the Striped Crake at Thiyeni hide in Hluhluwe Game Reserve. Hidden somewhere between our thoughts of optimism, we all knew that given the small area which the hide overlooks, in combination with the…
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…
