by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
African Crake at Strandfontein Sewage Works
Late yesterday afternoon I received an email from the South African Rare Bird alerts, saying that an African Crake had been seen and photographed at Strandfontein on the S3 pan in the afternoon. Unfortunately it was too late for us to leave from Somerset West to try and twitch the bird, so I decided to…
Lockdown Birding
The day is April 12, Good Sunday. We’ve been locked up now for weeks, the streets baron and desolate with the occasional wailing of police sirens echoing through the suburbs. Who knows when we’ll see freedom again… I’m just kidding of course. While much of that is true to a degree, I’d like to think…
Birding in the Helderberg – 16 June 2012
The weekend got started on the Friday evening with a great sunset, I headed down to Strand beach and positioned myself at the tidal pool and waited as the colours increased. While shooting, a couple walked onto the tidal pool wall and stood staring at the sunset for a bit, as can be seen in…
A Little Yellow Surprise: Western Yellow Wagtail At Macassar Sewage Works
Our Saturday started early. The plan was to drive through Van der Stel Pass near Botrivier, then head to Hawston to search for the Red-Breasted Swallow again. Things didn’t go quite as expected, and we ended the afternoon with a Western Yellow Wagtail in Macassar. Here’s how the day unfolded. Van der Stel Pass Birding…
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…
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…
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…
