by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
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…
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…
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…
Birding Cape Farms Area – 27 February 2014
This day was set to be far more memorable than I had imagined it would be. I woke up, and had to put in for a day’s leave urgently as I had to take care of some things; but I was free until 11:30 in the morning so I figured I would risk my unreliable…
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…
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…
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…
