by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Birding Elgin with the Somerset West Bird Club
With winter now fully upon us, the monthly outings have moved to departure occurring at 07:30. Cathryn, who has recently become a member of the Somerset West Bird Club would be enjoying the first outing as a member, while she had joined me on a previous outing to see how she would enjoy it, things…
Little Crake at Clovelly – Twitch Successful!
Finally I managed to successfully twitch a rare species! Just for a bit of a back story, last year I dipped on a Cape Vulture that was spotted not far from me in Strand. On that day, as soon as I got the rare bird report e-mail from Trevor Hardakar about the sighting I took…
Birding Around Cape Town (Intaka and Rietvlei)
After having seen Intaka mentioned all over my facebook’s newsfeed for a couple of months, and having been told about it in one of the Rondevlei hides – I decided that I would actually do some research and see what the Intaka Island Wetlands was. After a quick google, I came to the Intaka Island…
De Hoop Nature Reserve Visit – 2 May 2015
It’s been exactly two years since my last visit to De Hoop Nature Reserve, until this weekend that is. On Friday evening, Megan and myself discussed what we would be doing the next day and I asked her which of the Western Cape bird species she’d most like to see in person. Her response was…
Dipping The White-Headed Vulture On The R27
After weeks of waking up early, we decided to sleep in, only for me to wake up, check my phone, and see that a White-Headed Vulture was seen and photographed about an hour earlier along the R27, a short way outside Ganzekraal. The Drive to The West Coast The weather was brooding, with dark clouds…
The Not-So-Common Cuckoo
A bit of a late entry for this twitch, but about a month ago a local birder (whom I shall refrain from naming due to a bit of controversy that took place after the fact), heard about a Common Cuckoo found on a friends farm. The bird had been seen for a few days in…
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…
