Lagoon Birding
- John Weare | Ocean View Avenue
I arrived in San Diego in 1969, with Nancy and Chrissy, to begin a long teaching career in the Chemistry Department at UCSD, and luckily we found a home in Del Mar. Around 2015 I started to take pictures of these lovely creatures and realized that the pictures could reveal much more than casual views along the trail. So began my photographic efforts to broaden public understanding of bird life. I want to acknowledge that these efforts were supported by many friends (Nancy Weare, Ed Mirsky, Jeff Carmel, Al Tarkington, Dwight Worden, Maggie Brown) and the entire Bird Folk community.
I started to realize that birds have an intricate family life. They live in an uncontrollable, sometimes violent, environment and are skilled in providing protective nests and gathering food for their fragile young, protecting them from predators, and teaching these skills to the next generation.
A main objective of my photography is to try to make the bird’s story more transparent: nest building, chick protection and maturation patterns. A wonderful example is the osprey in the lagoon. Bird photography is a matter of quickly identifying what the bird is up to, where it is going, and then trying to get a good image – and the chance of that is slim.
An example of my good luck is in an osprey fishing sequence I managed to capture. You have to spot an osprey looking for its fish prey high in the air. Then you have to be ready to follow the rapid dive, the splash, and the emergence with the kids’ dinner in her/his talons. Spotting this can be a rare event.
To capture a sharp image of bird events in the Lagoon requires both patience and equipment. A fast camera is essential to just about any bird photography. And there is location: the birds are often not particularly close to the lagoon trails. Long focal length lenses are important — but are heavy and cumbersome, and require adjustments for the light, and to shutter speed to account for the quick movement of the bird. My favorite camera now is a Nikon Z9, my favorite lens is a 800 mm Nikon Phase Fresnel lens. Most of the pictures shown at right were taken with that lens.
John Weare can be seen almost daily around and about the San Dieguito Lagoon, his favorite place to photograph birds. His work includes extraordinary portraits and photographs that tell the stories of birds’ everyday lives.
