by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
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…
Twitching A Marabou Stork
If you read my previous blog entry, you would have seen that while attempting to twitch the Marabou Stork near Bredasdorp, the car I was driving managed to suffer a case of the flat-tyre. In turn, we had to call off our plans to head to Bredasdorp and make a straight line back home. It…
Road To 300 – Lesser Crested Tern at Strandfontein Sewage Works (295)
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…
Holy Macaroni Penguin
I’m certainly not complaining, but what’s up with all the rarities the last two or three weeks. It’s not uncommon for rare birds to pop up around the Western Cape in February and March, but it’s been an action-packed few weeks, with a lot of lifers on the line for Milli and me. The Alert…
A Day of Birding – Strandfontein, Dick Dent and Helderberg
A plan was made to head out on Saturday 2 June with a couple of other birders in the area, one of which I knew online. I stumbled out of bed at 6:50am after a barrage of alarm clocks I had set to ensure I would get there on time. The plan was to visit…
Birding Around Cape Town (Intaka and Rietvlei)
After having seen Intaka mentioned all over my facebook’s newsfeed for a couple of months, and having been told about it in one of the Rondevlei hides – I decided that I would actually do some research and see what the Intaka Island Wetlands was. After a quick google, I came to the Intaka Island…
Storm Chasing Adventures
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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…
