by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Birding at Paarl Sewage Works
Rather spontaniously, on Sunday morning Cathryn and I decided that we would take the trip through to Paarl Bird Sanctuary. I knew that she still need both White Faced and Fulvous Ducks and what better place to find them, earlier in the week the Fulvous had been reported, so things were looking good to get…
Somerset West Bird Club Outing – 21 July 2012
After meaning to make one of the Bird Club outings for a number of months, I finally had the weekend free and was completely dedicated to attending this time. I started following the timing of the weather closely from early in the week and one day it looked terrible, then it looked more promising and…
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…
Grootvadersbosch – Day 2 (Forest Birding)
This is a continuation from my previous blog post. We woke up on the 2nd day of our holiday at around 6:30, in an attempt to head out into the Grootvadersbosch forest by 8:00, which was achieved. Some common birds hung around near the cottage as we were getting ready to leave, including some Cape…
12 Things I’ve Learned From Twitching
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…
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
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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…
