by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Birding the Swartland with the Somerset West Bird Club
This month the Somerset West Bird Club would be going to – well that depends. Originally the Batis was saying that we would be going to Hillcrest Farm, which I assume was the Hillcrest Farm in Durbanville. However, to my surprise, on the day we were told that we would actually be visiting some farms…
Pelagic Birding Off Cape Point – (24 April 2016)
My last pelagic trip was three years ago. Funnily enough, it was three years ago almost to the day (3 days off). In my last entry I managed to amass plenty of new lifers, but ended my previous post with the sentence “Next time, I’ll be setting my sights on the Pintado Petrel…” And so…
Birding Cape Farms Area – 27 February 2014
This day was set to be far more memorable than I had imagined it would be. I woke up, and had to put in for a day’s leave urgently as I had to take care of some things; but I was free until 11:30 in the morning so I figured I would risk my unreliable…
The Return of the Tawny
For those reading with the intention of only hearing about the Tawny sighting, you can scroll down to Tuesday 25 September. Wednesday – 19 September 2012 Another lunch time meet up with Tertius Gous at the Helderberg Nature Reserve started off with a sighting of a Juvenile Jackal Buzzard in close proximity on the drive…
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…
The Buzzard Problem – Differentiating Steppe, Jackal and Forest Buzzards
Truth be told, I first started writing this article over a year ago, and it was a lot more bloated than this piece is. Over the past several years, I took a particular interest in raptors, and specifically Buzzards, more than likely because they were the birds that I came across most often in the…
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…
