by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Christmas At The Breede River – Day 3
The final day at The Breede started early, just before sunrise I got up and exited the tent and decided to make the most of what time was left there. After walking down to the river, the sun started to appear over the horizon, and with it the bird life started to ignite. There were…
My Top 10 Twitches and Rare Bird Discoveries
In this blog post I’m going to run through my most memorable twitches and rare bird discovers while out in the field. Some because of the adventure behind it, others because of the bird itself. My first twitch was in early 2012, and in that time I’ve been lucky enough to see many more special…
Birding in Somerset West – 9 June to 11 June 2012
After a series of cold and wet days during the past week, as soon as the cold fronts began to clear I headed to the Helderberg Nature Reserve for a very short check on the pond which tends to get some interesting visitors at times.
A West Coast Adventure – Part 1
Both Monique and I have been planning to get away for a while now, and while our initial plans were to head east and camp in the Wilderness, with winter now fairly close we decided that it may be rather risky at this time of the year. Instead we decided to look elsewhere. I initially…
The Tristan Challenge
Prior to my recent Flock at Sea cruise, I knew little about the Tristan Albatross. Sure, I had seen it in my guide books and the fact that it was listed as a critically endangered species. But only after the events on board the MSC Sinfonia did I begin to read about the bird and…
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….
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…
