by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
Searching for Raptors at the Helderberg Nature Reserve
After a day of some birding that was less successful than I had hoped I decided to wake up early once again and dedicate the day to trying to see some raptors, an idea which at the end of it all I realized is probably far better done in summer. The weather was much better…
A Day at the West Coast National Park
I recently decided to eventually head to the West Coast National Park with my girlfriend, the West Coast is a place that I haven’t been to in many years but have continued to hear good things about by both birders and herpers alike. I decided to go on Easter Friday as I figured it would…
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…
Garden Route Twitch – White-Browed Scrub Robin & Violet Backed Starling
Some rare bird news filtered in during the week of a juvenile Violet-Backed Starling photographed in at a garden feeder in Groot Brak River, along with the presence of a Great Spotted Cuckoo and White-Browed Scrub Robin at Reflections Eco-Reserve at Rondevlei (Wilderness). The premise of the ‘Scrubber’ and the provincial mega Violet-Backed Starling had…
Autumn Birding in Rooi Els and Jonkershoek
There’s been a bit of a lull with regards to rare birds over the past two weeks, so I haven’t been engaged in any twitching. Instead, I’ve been focusing more on helping Monique gather new species for her life list. Having only started a few months ago, she has quite a few birds to see…
Chasing Targets – Rooi Els, Rooisand and Elgin
With my provincial list now requiring me to travel a fair amount in order to see new birds, and petrol being at near all time highs, this past weekend saw Monique and myself set some fairly easy target birds for her list. Having just started listing in February of this year, she still has a…
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…
