by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Grootvadersbosch – Day 3 (Rained Out)
This post is a continuation from part 1 and part 2 of birding at Grootvadersbosch. We awoke on Friday morning, the last full day at Honeywood – to a wet and miserable day. Well more wet than miserable. It had rained through the night and there were showers on and off in the morning, during…
The Return of the Tawny
For those reading with the intention of only hearing about the Tawny sighting, you can scroll down to Tuesday 25 September. Wednesday – 19 September 2012 Another lunch time meet up with Tertius Gous at the Helderberg Nature Reserve started off with a sighting of a Juvenile Jackal Buzzard in close proximity on the drive…
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…
Chasing Raptors at Helderberg Nature Reserve
I recently went through to Helderberg Nature Reserve with Monique to do some birding and help her grow her life list. We went through quite early in the morning, and it was my first birding visit to the reserve in a while. Since the pine plantations were cut down a few years ago I haven’t…
Road To 300 – Black-Bellied Starling in Gordon’s Bay (294)
Monday morning started like any other, in the office working. But at around 9pm or so I got a Facebook message from a friend. It was a collection of cell phone images of a Starling that was outside her house. She said that it looked like a Red-Winged Starling but without the red under the…
The Last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō – A Final Song
This is no doubt the most depressing piece I have ever written, and although my fingers press against the keys in an array of existential dread and carnivorous guilt, I feel as though the expression of thought through word is only fitting. Not as an undeserved relief to myself, but as tribute to what was…
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…
