by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
3 Dips and a Tick
There has been a bit of excitement around a couple of Ferruginous Ducks that were seen last week at the Paarl Bird Sanctuary. This weekend I was checking facebook constantly for updates from other birders to see one of two things: A) Whether they were in fact victims of reverse migration or B) Escapees. On…
Lockdown Birding
The day is April 12, Good Sunday. We’ve been locked up now for weeks, the streets baron and desolate with the occasional wailing of police sirens echoing through the suburbs. Who knows when we’ll see freedom again… I’m just kidding of course. While much of that is true to a degree, I’d like to think…
Road To 300 – Lesser Crested Tern at Strandfontein Sewage Works (295)
Saturday morning started out with some local birding. A trip to Dick Dent Bird Sanctuary in Strand with Monique, saw us getting her a few new ticks for her life list. We encountered a Lesser Honeyguide shortly into the visit, a nice record for the area. We also then came across a number of Amethyst…
Raptor Hunting at Jonkershoek Nature Reserve
The kind of hunting that takes place with a lens and shutter of course… I decided to give Jonkershoek Nature Reserve a try after a year of absence, I had only gone once prior and did not have much luck at all. I recently spoke to some other local birders though, one of which is…
Christmas At The Breede River – Day 3
The final day at The Breede started early, just before sunrise I got up and exited the tent and decided to make the most of what time was left there. After walking down to the river, the sun started to appear over the horizon, and with it the bird life started to ignite. There were…
The Battle for the Bee-Eaters
It started out a regular day, an autumn day like many other – I was at home with my partner and my cousin, hanging out – when I got a notification on one of the birding WhatsApp groups about some White-fronted Bee-eaters spotted at Harold Porter botanical gardens. It was already mid-afternoon and still had…
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…
