by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
The Double Dip
This is my first post since the new year, so happy new year everybody. I hope that you get out there and do lots of birding! My year has started with a car that keeps failing me and leaving me unable to bird as much as I’d want. Though thankfully I’ve had some help in…
Birding Paardevlei & Macassar (22 February 2014)
It was an early Saturday morning, and it actually started at the beach. I originally woke up early for a surf session, heading in at around 07:00, and leaving the glassy waters at around 09:30. I figured that since I was so close to Paardevlei, I may as well head down and see if there…
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…
Birding Around Cape Town – Mowbray and Kirstenbosch
This was the second consecutive weekend that I would be in Cape Town, and luckily for me the Snowy Egret was still around, giving me something to do while Megan was at work on Saturday. Saturday was off to a rough start, with having woken up at 4am with back pain and struggling to sleep….
A Day Out – Part 3 (Dick Dent Bird Sanctuary)
The final installment of my rather busy Saturday that happened on the 9th March. After spending my pre-sunrise hours at Sir Lowry’s Pass and my morning and mid-afternoon hours at Helderberg Nature Reserve, I went home for a couple of hours rest. It wasn’t long before the next item on the schedule arrived though. Each…
Road to 300 – Cloud Cisticola
Birding for me started out of my interest in photography, but soon became more closely tied to my interest in collecting things, especially rare items. The fact that birding allowed me to achieve two of my favourite hobbies at the same time was great. With time, the interest grew and became deeper with more focus…
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…
