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…
While looking back through my hard drive photographs this week I came across a mostly unpublished series of images from a trip I took about 4 years ago now, to the Drakensberg. While at the that time I had flown to Johannesburg many times before, and spent time in Pretoria quite a lot, I had…
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…
Megan and myself were lucky enough to be spending this Sunday with the Hardakers, whom I hadn’t had the pleasure of birding with properly since our last twitch of the Marabou Stork in 2013. The original plan was for us to head out on Saturday and target the Antarctic Terns in Jacobs Bay, and the…
This was the second consecutive weekend that I would be in Cape Town, and luckily for me the Snowy Egret was still around, giving me something to do while Megan was at work on Saturday. Saturday was off to a rough start, with having woken up at 4am with back pain and struggling to sleep….
In the middle of last week I made a post about my first twitch of the Snowy Egret which was spotted along the Black River near Cape Town a week ago now, I also mentioned how short I was on time — with my original twitch being done during my lunch break. Because I was…
Last night (8 June) I was running through my Facebook news feed when I saw a post made to the Wider Cape Town Birders Challenge group about an unusual Egret sighting that happened along Black River, just off the M5 near Cape Town. The post, made by Dominic Rollinson didn’t garner too much attention at…
Don’t let the title mislead you, this has nothing to do with the Cradle of Filth song by the same name. This post is delayed by about 2 months, since the shoot was originally done in April — but I felt the need to finally get some of these images off my hard drive and…
Last month Megan and myself were brain storming nearby locations to shoot and she mentioned the Taal Monument being a place she wanted to do a fashion shoot at, so we decided we’d make the 40km trip from Somerset West on the Sunday morning and scout out the Taal Monument’s possibilities. The Taal Monument (Afrikaans…
After shooting on my Canon 50D for nearly 4 years, I decided it was time for an upgrade and ordered a 70D. Due to my interests in both landscape photography as well as birding, it was the perfect camera for the budget that I had and aligned well with my needs. The 70D is the…
Lourensford Wine Estate in Somerset West is a location that I managed to shoot in my early years of photography, but due to fairly strict security I haven’t been in contact with them recently in order to shoot inside the farm. A couple of weeks ago however, I came across a post in my Facebook…
Recently I’ve been trying to find some new locations to shoot, and while I had pinned down a few within the 30 kilometer range, it’s not always easy to predict a good sunset ahead of time that would cater to driving to the location without a severe risk of disappointment. I ended up turning to…
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…
This past Saturday morning I was running through my Facebook news feed when I saw mention of a Yellow Wagtail reported at Strandfontein Sewage Works near Cape Town. Having the morning free, and having not had a chance to see a Yellow Wagtail yet, I debated the 40 minute drive for a bit before deciding…
I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to stay in Cape Town (Vredehoek) over this past weekend for 4 days, thanks to a friend (Andrew) who happened to be going out of town for the week and allowed me to stay at his place for the time. I’ve spent a lot of time around…