Upper Newport Bay Nature Preserve

Author's Comments

The bay does not announce itself. You drive through Newport, past the houses and the boats and the careful landscaping of a coastal city that knows what it is, and then the land opens into something older and stranger. The estuary winds in slow brown channels through the pickleweed and the cordgrass, and the herons stand exactly where they have always stood, which is wherever they please. I prefer it in February. The winter light over Southern California has a clarity that summer never quite achieves, and the migratory birds are at their fullest count. From the bluff above the Muth Center the channels lay out below in a pattern that almost reads as abstract from the right angle, the water silver in some places and dark in others depending on what the sky is doing overhead. Come at first light and the surface goes glass. The reflections are the photograph here, the doubled world of reed and bird and pale morning sky. The bluff trail is the easy access, but I have learned to walk down toward the water when I can. The scale changes. From above you see the shape of the estuary. From below you hear it, the small sounds of feeding and movement, the occasional clatter of wings. There are 200 species of birds in this preserve and on a good morning you will not need to seek them out. They will come through the frame on their own schedule. This is not a dramatic landscape. It is a quiet one, and it asks for a quiet kind of attention. Bring a longer lens. Bring patience. Stay until the light shifts.

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