Michael Umphrey Photography

02/18/2026

I've developed a hankering to vamoose--to head south for the winter, or at least a week of it. I'm leaving later today for Miami with plans to drive south to Key West.

I love Caribbean islands, and a few months ago I started making plans to go to Puerto Rico, which I set aside because it's just north of Venezuela and is the staging area for the U.S. military when war looked more likely than it does right now. I wasn't afraid--just avoiding disorder and confusion.

I decided on Key West because, like Puerto Rico, it's part of the U.S. and English is common but crime isn't. But now military action in Cuba seems more likely than in Venezuela, and Key West is only 90 miles from Cuba. Fortunately, I don't see Key West as much of a staging area for our war machine.

I may post shots taken with my phone. I've figured out how to get photos from my Nikons to my tablet, but I won't be able to do serious editing, and it's a little astonishing to me how good the cameras on our phones have become--though not of birds. I have nothing like my 500mm Nikon lens for my Pixel phone.

02/17/2026

Snow?
Meh. It'll be gone by 4.

02/12/2026

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.” – William Blake

02/12/2026

Little brown bird. Sigh. There are so many of these and I have to be in a certain mood to figure out which one. It's a mood that used to come more often. In this case, I note that the breast is not streaked like a song sparrow or a finch and its got a light streak above its eye. I think it's a female House Sparrow, fluffed up for the cold. I was attracted to the oranges and browns in a mostly white scene, as well as it sitting still patiently quite close to me.

People seem to "like" raptors and owls, which is fine, but I'm always grateful for all the little, common birds. Common birds (robins, sparrows, starlings, mallards, etc.) are the baseline of the bird world. Seeing them is like hearing a familiar song — it grounds you in the place and season. Besides, Many “ordinary” birds are stunning up close: the iridescent throat of a European Starling, the delicate streaking on a Song Sparrow, the soft cinnamon of a Carolina Wren. What looks “brown and boring” from 50 feet becomes intricate and gorgeous through binoculars or a camera. I had someone tell me he had never seen a kestrel. In this valley? I doubted that. But with the naked eye a spectacular kestrel on a fencepost looks like an ordinary brown bird.

Birders find a quiet, meditative pleasure in the everyday. Watching a flock of House Finches at a feeder or hearing the first American Crow of the morning is comforting — a small, reliable piece of nature in an unpredictable world. It's fun to chase rarities, but it's also important to appreciate what’s already here.

02/11/2026

Everything wants to eat Ring-necked pheasants, it seems. Most nest failure and adult mortality is due to predation. They've attracted human hunters ever since their introduction in the Willamette Valley in the late 1880s. They are deeply related to Western hunting culture, and their presence has supported rural economies via hunting tourism, influenced crop choices and field managment (such as leaving grain stubble), encouraged private land habitat projects, created a strong constituency for grassland conservation. Organizations such as Pheasants Forever (150,000+ members) have become big players in Western habitat policy.

Pheasants didn’t transform the West in the way bison, cattle, or cheatgrass did. Instead, they adapted to the human‑made West—and in doing so, nudged landowners, hunters, and conservationists toward maintaining the very grassland structures that many native species also depend on.

Even people who don't want to eat pheasants love to see them in the landscape.

02/10/2026

Seeing Rough-legged hawks in Montana during a milder-than-usual winter is not unexpected. They are regular winter visitors. The most important factor is probably the winter in the far north arctic regions where they nest. That's been regionally variable this year. Early in the season, large parts of the Arctic were running warmer than normal, but a polar‑vortex disruption in late November has since opened corridors for Arctic cold to spill south into North America, so conditions are mixed and regionally variable.

If you see hawks in a general, nonspecific way, they make the same impression as Red-tailed hawks, which are far more common. The Rough-leggeds have no notable presence in American literature and no notable or distinct presence in recorded native folklore and mythology.

Seeing a Rough-legged Hawk (with its hovering flight, dark belly band, and Arctic-adapted feathering) is not the same experience as seeing a generic “hawk.” Precise identification turns a fleeting sighting into a moment of recognition. It transforms nature from background scenery into something personal and meaningful—like recognizing a friend in a crowd instead of just seeing “people.”

In some indigenous traditions, recognizing a specific animal carries spiritual or symbolic weight naming a bird becomes a way of honoring it and claiming a moment of connection. Personally, it can become a small victory—spotting and correctly naming a Rough-legged Hawk feels like earning a quiet badge of awareness. Or maybe I'm making this up.

But maybe the name carries history, ecology, behavior, and meaning that a generic label flattens out. It makes the encounter more vivid, more informed, and more memorable. Maybe seeing a “Rough-legged Hawk” instead of “a hawk” is like hearing “Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata” instead of “piano music.”

02/09/2026

Pheasants are introduced game birds with showy plumage, so they indicate an intrusion of the exotic or the fragile wild into ordinary life. When startled, they run to nearby cover (tall grass, hedgerows, brush) or crouch and freeze to avoid detection; if the threat persists they often burst into a short, rapid flight to a new patch of cover.

Their survival strategies—concealment, quick decision making, seasonal shifts, and social signaling—offer clear, practical lessons for people. In this world we are often prey, even when we feel and act like predators.

02/08/2026

Great Blue Heron in the long winter without snow: that blue color tending toward turquoise, somewhere between the serenity of blue and the renewal of green, the color evokes mental clarity and emotional balance. It supports a sense of expansive possibility, even as the dead grass and dormant shrubs have more to do with dark ends. Snow's job is to cover the death with a soft purity --or to transform it to the hard clarity of ice.

The heron has mastered the posture of waiting, but I don't think this one is hunting. It seems paused to reflect, a readiness to cross into something else, an awareness of inescapable fate and maybe the ache of waiting for something that may never come.

02/07/2026

This doesn't look like the most comfortable perch, but what do I know? Short-eared owls hunt low, like harriers, but their flight is famously buoyant, floppy, and erratic, often compared to a giant moth coursing low over fields. They are usually silent--except during courtship.

They are here in the Mission Valley year around--or not. They are very nomadic, going to where the voles are.

02/06/2026

My granddaughter pointed to a flicker feeding on the ground and said "It looks like a woodpecker." And of course, it IS a woodpecker, although one that feeds on ants on the ground more often than insects in the bark of trees. Though as this shot shows, they can do the bark of trees.

It's been such a wonderful winter, though "winter" seems almost the wrong word.

"Men and women in all parts of the world have a desperate need to take time from their demanding routines of everyday life and to quietly observe God's miracles taking place all around them. Think of what would happen if all of us took time to look carefully at the wonders of nature that surround us and devoted ourselves to learning more about this world that God created for us!"

M. Russell Ballard

02/05/2026

Spring fever in February. . .

High pressure building over the Northern Rockies this week will result in warmer-than-normal daytime high temperatures. The forecast on Thursday is for temperatures to exceed or tie the historical record at three of our four official climate sites with long periods of record.

02/04/2026

How do we know what "majestic" means? Seeing an eagle can evoke a sense of transcendence--of height, power, freedom, stillness, dominance. These aren't just abstract ideas floating in the mind. Most abstract concepts rely on embodied metaphors: "up"= noble, "large"= important.

Majestic things tend to be high, large, unbounded. To the degree that an eagle emodies such qualities it can become a visual anchor for the abstraction.

Once we’ve seen enough examples, “majestic” becomes a category in the mind.
Images help us: compare, refine, generalize. So when we call a piece of music or a human gesture “majestic,” we’re drawing on the same embodied template: height, expansiveness, power, grace, distance, awe.

Human beings don’t learn abstractions in a vacuum. We learn them through our bodies first—through scale, posture, movement, light, and the emotional resonance those things create. That’s why images of eagles don’t just illustrate “majestic”; they teach us what majesty feels like.