Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve

Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve is a nature reserve in the city of Huntington Beach, CA. “Bolsa Chica” means “little bag” in Spanish, as the area was part of a historic Mexican land grant named Rancho La Bolsa Chica. You can find more information about Bolsa Chica here and here.

Bolsa Chica covers ~1445 acres of wildlife reserve and is home to close to 200 species of birds. A bird checklist, showing the names and the abundance of various birds in Bolsa Chica, can be found here. Some nice pictures of the various birds in Bolsa Chica are shown here.

We got a chance to visit Bolsa Chica this past weekend. According to most bird watchers, the best time of the day for watching birds would be earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon. We unfortunately arrived around noon time which meant that we not only got little chance to see many birds close by, but also had to deal with rather harsh sunlight. That being said, we still managed to take a few shots, particularly of this beautiful Brown Pelican who put up a very nice show for us.

Below are some of our pictures from this visit. All these shots are taken either with Nikon D800E + 300mm f/4 + TC1.4e II or with Nikon D7000 + 70-200 f/2.8 VRII + TC2.0e III. The first combination would give us 420mm f/5.6 on a full-frame sensor in D800E, whereas the second combination would give us 140-400mm f/5.6 on a cropped APS-C sensor in D7000, which, given Nikon’s 1.5X crop-factor, would give us an equivalent of 210-600mm focal length on a full-frame (35mm) sensor. Remember that the focal length is a property of the lens and it does not change just because the lens is used with a smaller sensor. What does change with the sensor size, is, in fact, the effective angle of view, and it is therefore a common practice to talk about the equivalent focal length which would have produced the same angle of view on a full-frame 35mm sensor. A good technical description of sensor sizes, and the crop factor or focal length multiplier can be found here. Finally, as we discussed in our earlier post on Salton Sea (here), using teleconverters reduces light entering into the lens. For example, that is why the maximum aperture in our second combination is reduced from f/2.8 to f/5.6.

We parked our car in the parking lot on the southern side of the reserve right on Pacific Coast Highway:

And, right after we walked over the wooden bridge, there was this beautiful Brown Pelican welcoming us to Bolsa Chica. Not sure why they are called Brown Pelican though, as they are pretty colorful indeed:

Unlike other birds seen from faraway distance, the Pelican was quite close to us, and given our long telephoto lenses, it proved extremely hard to track him within the frame during his amazingly quick jumps into the water, and, alas, we could not take any picture of him with fish in his mouth!

Later a second Brown Pelican joined as well:

While we could not catch a shot of the Pelicans with fish in their mouth, we managed to take one such shot of a beautiful and rather large Western Gull:

And of course, there was the Ring-Billed Gull:

And here are a few other birds we saw:

Finally, though not exactly a bird, we spotted this bee on a flower right in the parking lot, and took a quick picture. Given the size of the bees, a more appropriate lens for bee shots would be a Macro lens which could give a 1:1 magnification. Without a teleconverter, Nikon 300mm f/4, by itself, has a minimum focusing distance of 1.45m at which point it would give a maximum magnification ratio of 1:3.7. This means that, say, a 3.7mm object will be recorded as 1mm on the sensor. A teleconverter multiplier directly correlates with the increase in magnification ratio. For example, in our case with a 1.4X teleconverter, our effective max magnification (which would be achieved at minimum focusing distance) was 1:2.6 (3.7/1.4). Hopefully, in one of our future posts, we will talk more about Macro Photography. Until then, you can read more about magnification ratios and the different alternatives for increasing it here.

Hope you enjoyed some of these pictures. Thank you so much for visiting…