by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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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…
Grootvadersbosch – Day 1 (The Trip)
Recently Cathryn and I made the decision to postpone our desired trip up country to the KNP in order to focus on more Western Cape species, and with 1 May being a public holiday, I decided to put in for the Thursday and the Friday off work and to go away somewhere. I picked up…
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….
12 Things I’ve Learned From Twitching
I’ve been birding for three years now, having started in early 2012. And while I still lag behind many other birders in terms of dedication to twitching and to birding in general, over these years I have twitched between 10 and 20 birds (or rather attempted to) and driven thousands of kilometers in the search…
The Battle for the Bee-Eaters
It started out a regular day, an autumn day like many other – I was at home with my partner and my cousin, hanging out – when I got a notification on one of the birding WhatsApp groups about some White-fronted Bee-eaters spotted at Harold Porter botanical gardens. It was already mid-afternoon and still had…
Great Egret & Overberg Landscapes
On Friday a whatsapp message came through in a birding group, of a Great Egret spotted by Dave Winter, just passed Rooi Els. The message arrived just after 17:00, and once I had seen it, the time was already 17:30. I had to decide whether I’d make it to the location before sunset. I already…
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…
