by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Green Backed Heron at the Helderberg
This weekend began with me not expecting to be able to get out in the field at all due to the weather forecasts, but on Saturday morning I woke up and looked outside and saw that while it was cloudy, there was far more sun than I was originally expecting. I realized that this may…
Dick Dent Bird Sanctuary Meet Up
I recently headed to the Dick Dent Bird Sanctuary with the Somerset West Bird Club, originally I didn’t think I’d have time as I had an extremely busy schedule for the day, but after performing the errands I needed to, I found myself able to meet up with the small group of local birders at…
Dipping on the Great Spotted Cukoo & Dick Dent Outing
After another week of plummeting temperatures which brought snow to the mountains of the South-Western Cape, the Great Spotted Cuckoo in Klipheuwel seemed to be bracing it well, now present for nearly two weeks, it was last seen on Friday morning. Noting that the cold front was forecast to pass and give way to partly…
A Weekend Birding the Overberg
We’d been trying to make plans to stay with our friends Keir and Alouise in Napier for over a month now, however with winter conditions having been prevalent on most of the weekends we had tried planning, we’d just not been able to make it happen. Finally we were given an opportunity, as forecasts showed…
Reasons Why Provincial Listing is Awesome
While most birders work hard towards their life lists, whether it be a global life list or for their sub-region; some focus just as much on their provincial lists. Personally, I’ve always seen my Western Cape list as my most important, simply because that is the one I was able to focus on. Not having…
African Crake at Strandfontein Sewage Works
Late yesterday afternoon I received an email from the South African Rare Bird alerts, saying that an African Crake had been seen and photographed at Strandfontein on the S3 pan in the afternoon. Unfortunately it was too late for us to leave from Somerset West to try and twitch the bird, so I decided to…
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…
