by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Cuckoo for Buzzards
After my busy day out on Saturday the 9th of March I decided I may as well make the most of the fading summer weather and go out for the morning on Sunday, prior to the cricket which was starting at 10:00. We’re now losing more than 2 minutes of daylight a day with Autumn…
Birding Elgin with the Somerset West Bird Club
With winter now fully upon us, the monthly outings have moved to departure occurring at 07:30. Cathryn, who has recently become a member of the Somerset West Bird Club would be enjoying the first outing as a member, while she had joined me on a previous outing to see how she would enjoy it, things…
The Last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō – A Final Song
This is no doubt the most depressing piece I have ever written, and although my fingers press against the keys in an array of existential dread and carnivorous guilt, I feel as though the expression of thought through word is only fitting. Not as an undeserved relief to myself, but as tribute to what was…
Dipping The White-Headed Vulture On The R27
After weeks of waking up early, we decided to sleep in, only for me to wake up, check my phone, and see that a White-Headed Vulture was seen and photographed about an hour earlier along the R27, a short way outside Ganzekraal. The Drive to The West Coast The weather was brooding, with dark clouds…
Ravens and Kestrels and Swifts – Oh My
Well, it’s been a while since my last birding blog update, but at no fault of my own… Winter has been baring down on Cape Town in full force over the past few weeks, in fact this weekend will be the third straight weekend of rain, and while others have been making the most of…
Garden Route Birding – Day 3
This blog post is a continuation of my initial entry documenting our 4 day vacation in the Garden Route, staying at Lake Pleasant in Sedgefield and traveling to various nearby areas looking for bird life. Skip To: Rondevlei / Langvlei Kingfisher Country House Half-Collared Kingfisher Trail Franklin’s Gull at Klein Brak River Black Herons at…
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…
