by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
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…
Snowy Egret at Black River – 9 June 2015
Last night (8 June) I was running through my Facebook news feed when I saw a post made to the Wider Cape Town Birders Challenge group about an unusual Egret sighting that happened along Black River, just off the M5 near Cape Town. The post, made by Dominic Rollinson didn’t garner too much attention at…
European Nightjar At Helderberg Nature Reserve
Several weeks ago, a European Nightjar was reported at the Helderberg Nature Reserve in Somerset West, no more than 5 minutes from where I stay. I went to the reserve the day after the sighting and attempted to see the bird myself – but there was no sign of it. Fast forward to last week…
Grootvadersbosch – Day 3 (Rained Out)
This post is a continuation from part 1 and part 2 of birding at Grootvadersbosch. We awoke on Friday morning, the last full day at Honeywood – to a wet and miserable day. Well more wet than miserable. It had rained through the night and there were showers on and off in the morning, during…
Birding in the Helderberg – 16 June 2012
The weekend got started on the Friday evening with a great sunset, I headed down to Strand beach and positioned myself at the tidal pool and waited as the colours increased. While shooting, a couple walked onto the tidal pool wall and stood staring at the sunset for a bit, as can be seen in…
Improving Your Bird Identification
Being able to identify the bird you’re looking at is probably the most core aspect of birding, it is also one that doesn’t come without effort. Like with most things in life, what you put in is what you get out and if you continue trying to learn, you’re going to improve. If you become…
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…
