by Bryn De Kocks
Recent Adventures
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Bird Outings & Twitches
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…
Reasons Why Provincial Listing is Awesome
While most birders work hard towards their life lists, whether it be a global life list or for their sub-region; some focus just as much on their provincial lists. Personally, I’ve always seen my Western Cape list as my most important, simply because that is the one I was able to focus on. Not having…
A Few Birds and a Reptile
On Friday 4 May I found myself on my regular Friday route after work, driving from Somerset West to my girlfriend’s place in Sea Point. I began noticing a bit of a potential for an interesting sunset while I was driving on the N2 towards Cape Town and did my best to ensure that I…
The Buzzard Problem – Differentiating Steppe, Jackal and Forest Buzzards
Truth be told, I first started writing this article over a year ago, and it was a lot more bloated than this piece is. Over the past several years, I took a particular interest in raptors, and specifically Buzzards, more than likely because they were the birds that I came across most often in the…
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…
Rarities Galore at Strandfontein
While scrolling through my news feed on Facebook last Tuesday, I came across a post by Glynis Bowie asking for identification on a bird she had seen the previous weekend at Strandfontein Sewage Works. Me being the way I am with waders (In other words, useless) – I relied on the comments of others to…
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…
