by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Christmas At The Breede River – Day 3
The final day at The Breede started early, just before sunrise I got up and exited the tent and decided to make the most of what time was left there. After walking down to the river, the sun started to appear over the horizon, and with it the bird life started to ignite. There were…
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…
Little Ringed Plover at Vermont Salt Pan
Nearly three weeks ago, news broke that the country’s first Little Ringed Plover was discovered at the Tankatara Salt Pans near Port Elizabeth. It was mere minutes later that plans were being put in place by fellow twitchers to chase down the bird with a rather lengthy 16 hour return trip. I was one of…
Garden Route Birding – Day 3
This blog post is a continuation of my initial entry documenting our 4 day vacation in the Garden Route, staying at Lake Pleasant in Sedgefield and traveling to various nearby areas looking for bird life. Skip To: Rondevlei / Langvlei Kingfisher Country House Half-Collared Kingfisher Trail Franklin’s Gull at Klein Brak River Black Herons at…
Chasing Raptors at Helderberg Nature Reserve
I recently went through to Helderberg Nature Reserve with Monique to do some birding and help her grow her life list. We went through quite early in the morning, and it was my first birding visit to the reserve in a while. Since the pine plantations were cut down a few years ago I haven’t…
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…
