Meet Desir ee Deliz

HER CAMERA CHRONICLES FAMOUS EAGLES

WRITTEN BY: BILL LAPLANTE

She failed her first photography course in high school because she couldn’t develop her own film, the stuff we used to take to the lab to get prints.

These days she’s got more than 10,000 fans hanging on for the next digital photo of her subjects — the Southwest Florida Eagle Cam eagles, their offspring and the wildlife in and around their territory in North Fort Myers.

Self-taught photographer Desiree Deliz chronicles M-15 and his current nestmate, Rogue 23-3, and the two eaglets waiting to take their first flights out of the slash pine in a horse pasture. She joins 190 million worldwide viewers of the Southwest Florida Eagle Cam who share her fascination with the moment-to-moment happenings of the American eagle family which first took the online spotlight in December 2012. Followers in 190 countries have since watched the eagles cycling through life.

Many of those followers had become friends of Desiree, who regularly drives two hours from Hialeah to capture wildlife images on her Canon digital camera. “The nest is on many international bucket lists of things to see and visit,” she says. “I’ve been there hundreds of times, maybe a thousand.”

Gustavo, her husband, and Desiree became nurses. “I was an RN (registered nurse) when he was a welder in the heat of Miami. He looked at my job inside in air-conditioning and said, ‘that’s for me,’ then he became an LPN (licensed practical nurse).”

The marriage of 26 years had produced two talented daughters, Maritza, also an RN in Florida, and Marina, pursuing her dream of directing Hollywood movies after finishing her Ivy League undergraduate degree.

Desiree says: “Gustavo was visiting south Florida from his home in Columbia when his sisters dragged him to a dance club for the evening. He didn’t even want to go, though when I saw him, I knew he was ‘the one’ for me.”

Married after a year of dating, Desiree says, “he was a good person. He even built our house, the one I still live in … I’ll never sell it!”

Desiree Deliz says of the Southwest Florida Eagle Cam celebrities and her drive to film them in 2013, “the madness — no, not madness, the magic began.”

Desiree Deliz fell for the eagles and wanted to tell their stories in pictures. Some folks do Vegas or a surf-splashed oasis for a 25th anniversary. Instead, Gustavo took his love and best friend to the middle of a horse pasture in North Fort Myers. He knew she wanted to photograph Ozzie and Harriet and he wanted to make her happy for their special day.

She still relives the perfection of that day near the McDonald’s (where her husband enjoyed an anniversary Big Mac solo) while she snapped away at the eagle family on Bayshore Road.

Sadly, Gustavo Enrique Cepeda died in a 2014 motorcycle accident in Broward County. But he lives forever in Desiree’s heart.

As do Ozzie and Harriet … and now M-15 and Rogue 23-3. And a string of eagles soaring over southwest Florida skies!