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
A West Coast Adventure – Part 2
This is a continuation of the previous post. We woke up fairly on Thursday and first looked at the forecast, so we could decide our next plan of action. We had paid for 2 nights of accommodation already, but spending a second night in weather that would keep us indoors seemed pointless. We could rather…
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…
An Escape To Montagu
It’s been three years since my last post and twelve years since my first on this blog. It’s hard to believe that so many years have passed. Still, the truth is Covid lockdowns, and a world of chaos didn’t bode well for recreational productivity. I’ve spent much of the last several years grappling with the…
A Winter Visit to False Bay Nature Reserve
With a rare weekend of beautiful winter weather on the cards, I made sure to get out in the field as much as possible this weekend. Saturday I spent the day at Lourensford Farm building up a list of species for their conservation department, while on Sunday I went through to Strandfontein Sewage Works with…
Autumn Birding in Rooi Els and Jonkershoek
There’s been a bit of a lull with regards to rare birds over the past two weeks, so I haven’t been engaged in any twitching. Instead, I’ve been focusing more on helping Monique gather new species for her life list. Having only started a few months ago, she has quite a few birds to see…
The Search for Steppe Buzzards
Steppe Buzzards are the most common of raptors for parts of South Africa during the summer months, specifically the Western Cape. Yet somehow my encounters with these creatures had been limited, in actual fact, I had seen more individual Cape Mystery Buzzards than I had Steppe Buzzards. I wanted to encounter the Steppe Buzzard as…
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…
