by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Twitching The Dusky Lark in Beaufort West
The Return of Another Twitch Bus Adventure For context, the SA Rare Bird News Report announced on the 7th of April that the province’s first Dusky Lark had been found the day before at Springfontein Dam in Beaufort West. It was twitched successfully by several birders in the following weeks, though it often seemed to…
Somerset West Bird Club Outing and More
Friday – 17 August 2012 Starting on Friday, after a series of strong cold fronts which brought some damaging winds, icy temperatures and heavy rain, the sun was finally showing again and on my way home from work for lunch I noticed an unusually large amount of Pied Crows circling around the area, I figured…
Improving Your Bird Identification
Being able to identify the bird you’re looking at is probably the most core aspect of birding, it is also one that doesn’t come without effort. Like with most things in life, what you put in is what you get out and if you continue trying to learn, you’re going to improve. If you become…
Strandfontein and Rondevlei – Autumn Birding
Last weekend, weather conditions prevented any birding – with gale force winds and intermittent rain from Friday through until Tuesday. Because of this, Cathryn and myself were both keen, should the weather co-operate – to head out and try get some birding done. Come Saturday late morning, we found ourselves looking at the options. The…
One Good Tern Deserves Another – Elegant Tern
Recently there have been several rarities pop up around the Cape Town area, but I had yet to twitch any of them, despite being on my to-do lists. However, on Saturday 5th February Trevor Hardaker dropped me a message letting me know that him and Margaret were going through to Hermanus to see the Elegant…
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,…
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…
