by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
Enjoy My Content?
Consider signing up for my newsletter, and you’ll get the latest adventures delivered directly to your email.
Bird Outings & Twitches
Spring Is Here – So Are The Raptors
Well Spring is definitely in the air with avian activity picking up, with both breeding pairs being seen more actively and some of the migratory birds returning. Though it is not only birds that are giving hints of the season, the Oak trees are now almost completely green in places and with the weather forecasts…
Strandfontein Birding Trip – 09 March 2025
After an unsuccessful chase of the Long-Crested Eagle that was seen near Klapmuts, Milli and I woke up to morning load shedding, a good time to go out and do some birding! Although I’ve been to Strandfontein dozens of times, Milli had only been a few – and she still had some fairly easy species…
Twitching The Wattled Lapwing At Paardevlei
It’s been a busy last few weeks in the Cape with rarities, and with several provincial lifers for me all found relatively close, Milli and I found the time to get outside and find some of these birds. The elephant in the room is, of course, the fact that my last twitching post was made…
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…
Twitching A Marabou Stork
If you read my previous blog entry, you would have seen that while attempting to twitch the Marabou Stork near Bredasdorp, the car I was driving managed to suffer a case of the flat-tyre. In turn, we had to call off our plans to head to Bredasdorp and make a straight line back home. It…
Holy Macaroni Penguin
I’m certainly not complaining, but what’s up with all the rarities the last two or three weeks. It’s not uncommon for rare birds to pop up around the Western Cape in February and March, but it’s been an action-packed few weeks, with a lot of lifers on the line for Milli and me. The Alert…
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…
