by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Somerset West Bird Club Outing and More
Friday – 17 August 2012 Starting on Friday, after a series of strong cold fronts which brought some damaging winds, icy temperatures and heavy rain, the sun was finally showing again and on my way home from work for lunch I noticed an unusually large amount of Pied Crows circling around the area, I figured…
Birding Around Cape Town – Mowbray and Kirstenbosch
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….
An Escape To Montagu
It’s been three years since my last post and twelve years since my first on this blog. It’s hard to believe that so many years have passed. Still, the truth is Covid lockdowns, and a world of chaos didn’t bode well for recreational productivity. I’ve spent much of the last several years grappling with the…
Strandfontein Birding Trip – 09 March 2025
After an unsuccessful chase of the Long-Crested Eagle that was seen near Klapmuts, Milli and I woke up to morning load shedding, a good time to go out and do some birding! Although I’ve been to Strandfontein dozens of times, Milli had only been a few – and she still had some fairly easy species…
A Twitch Bus Adventure – A Parting Gift (Part 3)
While our trip had seen us awake at completely unreasonable hours, it was decided that we wouldn’t be rushing out on Saturday, and instead we’d take it easy. We still wanted to hit the road in the morning though, as we’d be starting our venture back to Cape Town. While everyone else enjoyed their breakfast,…
Incredible Bird Interactions At Spier, Stellenbosch
On Saturday, March 15th, 2025, we set out on a mission to try and get some good bird photographs rather than going after one bird in particular. The idea was to travel around the Helderberg, stopping at various locations and doing some short birding to see what turned up. Of course, there’s always the desire…
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…
