by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Bird Club Outing – Vergenoegd and Spier
After a nearly three year absence from the Somerset West bird club outings, I decided to join up with the club again as they visited Vergenoegd Farm and Spier Wine Farm during the monthly outing. After fighting with the warmth of the duvets, we managed to make it to the meeting area in time, with…
Rarities Galore at Strandfontein
While scrolling through my news feed on Facebook last Tuesday, I came across a post by Glynis Bowie asking for identification on a bird she had seen the previous weekend at Strandfontein Sewage Works. Me being the way I am with waders (In other words, useless) – I relied on the comments of others to…
The Twitch Bus Does Tankatara – A Warbler Special
This past week saw the Tankatara area near Port Elizabeth become the birding hotspot for the week, with an eruption of rarities reporting in the span of a few days. The action all started when a Little Ringed Plover was picked up on the salt pans on Saturday the 26th of August. The bird was…
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…
A Few Birds and a Reptile
On Friday 4 May I found myself on my regular Friday route after work, driving from Somerset West to my girlfriend’s place in Sea Point. I began noticing a bit of a potential for an interesting sunset while I was driving on the N2 towards Cape Town and did my best to ensure that I…
Differentiating Little Egret and Snowy Egret
In South Africa we encounter countless amounts of Little Egrets out in the field. They are a common bird which are typically found in shallow areas of water, both salt and fresh water. When compared to our other Egrets; it’s a fairly straight forward identification process. With that said, when one throws into the mix…
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…
