Saturday morning started out with some local birding. A trip to Dick Dent Bird Sanctuary in Strand with Monique, saw us getting her a few new ticks for her life list. We encountered a Lesser Honeyguide shortly into the visit, a nice record for the area. We also then came across a number of Amethyst…
Monday morning started like any other, in the office working. But at around 9pm or so I got a Facebook message from a friend. It was a collection of cell phone images of a Starling that was outside her house. She said that it looked like a Red-Winged Starling but without the red under the…
This past week I had made plans with Monique, for us to try tick the Lemon Doves at Kirstenbosch Gardens and then head down to Mouille Point in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a Sabine’s Gull over the ocean. On the Friday I was then given a great opportunity to attend a pelagic…
In this blog post I’m going to run through my most memorable twitches and rare bird discovers while out in the field. Some because of the adventure behind it, others because of the bird itself. My first twitch was in early 2012, and in that time I’ve been lucky enough to see many more special…
After our recently failed attempt at finding the Protea Seedeater at Paarl Nature Reserve, Monique and I headed through to Harold Porter Nature Reserve in Betty’s Bay after someone reported seeing a pair of Protea Seedeater near the entrance a few days prior. Weather seemed great upon our departure from Somerset West, though once we…
Birding for me started out of my interest in photography, but soon became more closely tied to my interest in collecting things, especially rare items. The fact that birding allowed me to achieve two of my favourite hobbies at the same time was great. With time, the interest grew and became deeper with more focus…
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…
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…
While scrolling through my news feed on Facebook last Tuesday, I came across a post by Glynis Bowie asking for identification on a bird she had seen the previous weekend at Strandfontein Sewage Works. Me being the way I am with waders (In other words, useless) – I relied on the comments of others to…
This is a continuation of the previous post. We woke up fairly on Thursday and first looked at the forecast, so we could decide our next plan of action. We had paid for 2 nights of accommodation already, but spending a second night in weather that would keep us indoors seemed pointless. We could rather…
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…
My last pelagic trip was three years ago. Funnily enough, it was three years ago almost to the day (3 days off). In my last entry I managed to amass plenty of new lifers, but ended my previous post with the sentence “Next time, I’ll be setting my sights on the Pintado Petrel…” And so…
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…
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…
Recently there have been several rarities pop up around the Cape Town area, but I had yet to twitch any of them, despite being on my to-do lists. However, on Saturday 5th February Trevor Hardaker dropped me a message letting me know that him and Margaret were going through to Hermanus to see the Elegant…
It was Megan’s birthday a couple of months ago and as a gift from her grandparents, they gave her access to their holiday home in Onrus for a weekend. After an initial delay, the time had come for us to venture eastward, for the last weekend of July. I am not a stranger to Onrus…
After some very good rainfalls on Friday evening, the weather had cleared by Sunday and unlike the previous day, there was hardly any wind around. Not wanting to waste the rare pleasure of a warm and sunny winter’s day, we headed through to Rietvlei in Milnerton at around 09:30. I had previously been to Rietvlei…
Truth be told, I first started writing this article over a year ago, and it was a lot more bloated than this piece is. Over the past several years, I took a particular interest in raptors, and specifically Buzzards, more than likely because they were the birds that I came across most often in the…
The old class mates, social acquaintances or family members who have me on social networks see my birding related posts and their automatic assumption is more than likely, “He must really like looking at birds. It sounds boring”. Though the reality of the situation is far different than what they assume. While for many birdwatching…
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…