Sonoma’s Nature and Optics Festival returns to Barracks plaza

Children and grown-ups of Sonoma can find what they’re looking for, even if they didn’t know they needed it, at the seventh annual Wine Country Nature and Optics Festival, held this Saturday at the Sonoma Barracks.

What’s at an optics festival? Binoculars, of course, telescopes for astronomers and spotting scopes for the serious birder. But also tripods and camera-cradles to enable what’s now called digiscoping – “the new hot trend in photography, marrying camera technology with telescope tech,” according to Optics Fair co-founder Tom Rusert.

Defined as the activity of using a digital camera to record images by coupling it with an optical telescope, digiscoping is the natural outgrowth of related innovations in optics and digital photography. After all, it’s basically just putting your digital phone lens up to a telescope, but it’s come a long way in the last 20 years of digital photography.

Now companies like Swarovski Optik of Austria, among the companies who will be in Sonoma on Saturday, make specialized camera attachments for almost any brand for their most powerful spotting scopes. The package will cost almost $3,000, but there are lower-price options available as well.

Among other optics companies visitors will find at the Sonoma State Parks’ Casa Grande plaza, between the Toscano Hotel and the Barracks, will be Celstron, Kowa, Leica, Nikon and Zeiss, as well as two companies new this year, former Czech company Meopta and tripod specialists Sirui. They will demonstrate and sell their wide range of optics technology.

“There’s no single better day of optic sales in the country than in Sonoma,” said James Blackstock of Out of This World Optics, the Mendocino-based company that is co-sponsoring the Wine Country Nature and Optics Festival.

“The free event is for anyone who cherishes the outdoors and desires to learn more about our natural world,” said Rusert, who with his partner Darren Peterie co-founded the largest single nature event in Northern California, which over 1,000 people attend each year.

After working on the Christmas Bird Count and founding the CBC for Kids, they started doing regular lectures at the Sonoma Mission. “But there’s only so many lectures you can do on birds. That went on for 12 years and so we changed it to a nature lecture series. That opened the door to coyotes, bears, river otters, beavers, all the others.”

That’s why the festival now includes nature organizations representing “fins, feathers, fauna, flora and flippers” to introduce the public to many important conservation efforts from Sacramento to San Jose, Rusert points out. These include All About Owls and International Bird Rescue, two organizations who may show up with live birds.

“Some of the injured birds like owls and hawks that are no longer able to survive in the wild are used by selected nonprofits for classroom and public education,” said Rusert. “It’s always very popular. It’s a bit more difficult with the lion and bear folks,” he added.

Other nature organizations include River Otter Ecology, Redwood Regional Ornithological Society, Ducks Unlimited, the Sonoma Ecology Center and many more. Nature photographers and other crafts vendors will also be on hand, with kid-oriented activities whenever possible.

The Wine Country Optics and Nature Festival takes place on Saturday, Sept. 8, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 20 E. Spain St., Sonoma. Admission is free.

Visit sonomabirding.com for more information.