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
Grootvadersbosch – Day 4 (Road Side Birding)
This is the final part of my four part blog series documenting my vacation to Grootvadersbosch. Saturday, we woke up and lay in bed a bit – until I read some e-mails on my phone and saw that there was a Marabou Stork located near Bredarsdorp, and while it was an extra 80 or so…
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,…
Public Holiday at Rondevlei
A couple of weeks ago there was a public holiday in the middle of the week and I decided I would head to Rondevlei as it had been a year since my last visit, entirely too long if you ask me. I won’t lie, there was some hesitation in the idea of using the rare…
A Weekend Birding the Overberg
We’d been trying to make plans to stay with our friends Keir and Alouise in Napier for over a month now, however with winter conditions having been prevalent on most of the weekends we had tried planning, we’d just not been able to make it happen. Finally we were given an opportunity, as forecasts showed…
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…
A Twitch Bus Adventure – Malagasy Pond Heron (Part 1)
“Who’s on board the twitch bus?”, a query asked a few times this past week in our local whatsapp birding group. A newcomer to the group, I had assumed any mention of a twitch bus was purely in jest; there surely couldn’t be a twitch bus. That was until Garth Shaw sent me a message:…
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…
