by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
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…
Bird Club Outing – Vergenoegd and Spier
After a nearly three year absence from the Somerset West bird club outings, I decided to join up with the club again as they visited Vergenoegd Farm and Spier Wine Farm during the monthly outing. After fighting with the warmth of the duvets, we managed to make it to the meeting area in time, with…
African Crake at Strandfontein Sewage Works
Late yesterday afternoon I received an email from the South African Rare Bird alerts, saying that an African Crake had been seen and photographed at Strandfontein on the S3 pan in the afternoon. Unfortunately it was too late for us to leave from Somerset West to try and twitch the bird, so I decided to…
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…
Northern RockHopper Penguin at Soetwater
I have been an awful birder of late, just horrible… I never twitched the Black Tern at Strandfontein, nor the Baillon’s Crake at Intaka Island. To be frank, I just haven’t had the energy for the most part. I should explain that my personality caters itself to obsession, followed by periods of complete inactivity, then…
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…
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…
