by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Autumn Birding in Rooi Els and Jonkershoek
There’s been a bit of a lull with regards to rare birds over the past two weeks, so I haven’t been engaged in any twitching. Instead, I’ve been focusing more on helping Monique gather new species for her life list. Having only started a few months ago, she has quite a few birds to see…
Autumn at Kirstenbosch Gardens
After a night of little sleep, I woke up to a sunny Autumn day in April and with my girlfriend Monique feeling a bit under the weather I hoped to try and makes things a bit better by planning a spontaneous mission. I opened up Google maps and began looking at possible destinations that would…
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…
Winter Birding – Helderberg Area
It’s been a while since my last post, and with good reason. Winter reigned down on Cape Town recently, last weekend there was a large storm which also brought snow to many areas, especially the higher mountainous areas. The rain continued for a good few days, which brought with it both pros and cons. While…
Birding at Rooi Els and Bettys Bay
Somerset West Bird Club Outing – Rooi Els and Betty’s Bay (16 March 2013) The day started as any good day of birding does, by waking up far too early. The alarms were set for 5:00, allowing us 45 minutes to wake up, get ready and to grab some snacks/breakfast and put in petrol. Cathryn,…
A Twitch Bus Adventure – Malagasy Pond Heron (Part 1)
“Who’s on board the twitch bus?”, a query asked a few times this past week in our local whatsapp birding group. A newcomer to the group, I had assumed any mention of a twitch bus was purely in jest; there surely couldn’t be a twitch bus. That was until Garth Shaw sent me a message:…
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…
