Hansen: Birding culture is full of color and concern

Like any hobby, birding has rules.

For example, don’t call a bird photographer a birder.

Don’t inadvertently step on endangered bird nests.

And don’t try to fit in by imitating a shrill bird sound.

You will learn these rules within about the first three minutes of visiting the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach.

If you’re like most people, you have driven past the reserve off Pacific Coast Highway without a thought. It’s flat, swampy and seemingly barren.

But if you look more closely, you may notice some people with floppy hats, khaki safari vests and extremely long telephoto lenses.

I make the mistake of calling the first photographer I meet a birder.

“I’m not a birder,” says Allen Presilda of Buena Park, reluctantly shaking my hand. “I am a bird photographer, but I’m terrible with names.”

That’s one big difference between birders and bird photographers. Birders are more like bird encyclopedias. Photographers … not so much.

“It started with a sparrow and then a hummingbird,” Presilda says of his interest. “I just like what’s pretty.”

Like many bird photographers, Presilda sets up on a pedestrian bridge that crosses part of the 1,200 acres of wetlands.

For him, it’s about the beauty and relaxation after work.

“I stop here instead of fighting traffic,” he says. “It’s really relaxing. We live in a crazy world.”

Presilda peers into his camera and fires off a flurry of shots at a hovering white bird.

“What is that?” I ask.

“A tern,” he says.

“A tern,” I repeat, nodding my head knowingly. I later learn that the reserve is home to the largest colony of elegant terns in the U.S.

“You should talk to Steve,” he says, pointing to an older bearded man walking up from the far end of the bridge. He, too, has a very large lens.

“He’s the grandfather of bird photography,” Presilda says. “He just saved a tern.”

I introduce myself to Steve Eric Smith, who has been coming to the reserve for about 15 years.

Camouflaged and muddy, Smith has just jumped from the bridge into the muck of the wetland after a baby tern got caught in a mussel.

“It’s something that birds get caught in fairly regularly,” he says. “It was in water up to its neck, and the tide was coming in. The bird was struggling and we assumed it was stuck.

“I took my shoes off and jumped over the side. I didn’t want the bird to be injured. You have to break the mussel. I got the bird’s toe out, and we released it and it ran back to its parents. Its parents actually attacked us while we were down there. They were protective.”

Smith knows the parent birds. He knows they first nested here last year. He also knows how many babies they’ve had (seven), how many have survived so far (five) and how old the one he just saved was (29 days).

He’s like a bird mini-encyclopedia, but don’t call him a birder either.

“The birders are very different from the photographers for the most part,” he says. “There are maybe a few people who kind of overlap. There are some birder photographers, but they’re very different people. It’s hard to explain.”

Birders generally have more of a check-box mentality to birds, Smith says. Once they’ve seen a certain species, they tend to move on to the next one.

For bird photographers, it’s more about the experience, light, angles or new visual possibilities.

“There’s always something new you can photograph,” he says. “The more you learn about nature, the more interesting it becomes. And also there’s things that change all the time. Last year, we had three species of loons, and larger numbers than have ever been here before.”

Smith originally started walking at the reserve to get some exercise. Then he noticed all the wildlife and began filming with a video camera.

“Then, one day, someone loaned me a camera and lens, and I never looked back,” he says.

With the cost of very good equipment now under $1,000, it’s easier for people to get into wildlife photography.

If he has any advice to those just starting out, it’s to do it for the right reasons.

“You have to like it,” he says. “You have to at least appreciate nature. You have to open up your mind and figure it out. There’s a lot going on out there. There’s a lot besides the birds.”

He says the birds often get a lot of attention because they are so colorful and animated, but he also enjoys looking into the water and seeing the connection to something bigger.

“Organisms, sunlight, plankton … there’s sharks, there’s stingrays. It’s all of life. It’s vast. It’s like a machine. It lives on fuel. It takes times to understand any of it. We all came from nature. It’s part of us.”

To experience this life, all it takes is a detour. It’s a stone’s throw to the beach but worlds apart from bustling surf and flashy suntans.

This is more subtle, immersive and, ultimately, maybe more gratifying — even if you never learn the bird names.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at [email protected].