Just Passing Through
Found Moments: vignettes pulled from the flow of travel and time
This post forms part of Found Moments — a series capturing quiet glimpses of humanity and the natural world, drawn from the flow of travel and time. Often unplanned. Always unposed.
Drawn from my photo archive, these aren’t necessarily my ‘best’ images but more the kind that linger in the mind long after they’ve been taken: a gesture, a glance, a fleeting moment of action or, as in this moment, the stillness between predator and prey - something instinctual, unscripted, and quietly startling. A fragment of a parallel world.
"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
—Mary Oliver
It was a warm May afternoon in 2020, and, as for many of us, I was on furlough and spending a lot of time outside. From the garden I noticed buzzards and red kites circling low over a field at the edge of our farmland. There were more than usual - too many for it to be routine - and I guessed they must be feeding.
I grabbed my camera and ran down our field, between a row of apple trees and the hedgerow, trying not to disturb them. As I crept closer, I saw a buzzard on the ground close to a kill - what looked like a hare, already lifeless in the flattened stubble. I raised my camera and began to photograph in what felt like a moment of suspended time.
Then something unexpected happened; and I breathed out ‘oh’.
A brown hare loped past the buzzard standing by the dead hare. No noisy kerfuffle. Only outstretched wings and a steely stare at the intruder. Just proximity. The hunter already fed. The living one moving on.
Brown hare passing within metres of a European Common Buzzard in a Highland field. The buzzard stands beside the lifeless form of another hare, wings outstretched.
European Common Buzzard standing in a Highland stubble field near the still body of a hare on a warm May afternoon. Its mottled brown feathers blend with the dry grass, yellow eyes fixed on the hare as it slows its gait. The scene is quiet and watchful, holding a sense of suspended tension.
European Common Buzzard standing in a Highland stubble field near the still body of a hare on a warm May afternoon. Its yellow eyes are fixed on the passing hare as it increases its pace once again, as if to pounce.
The brown hare comes to a halt close to the dead hare while the buzzard looks on, almost quizzically.
"The eye is enticed by motion, but the soul is moved by stillness." ~ Robert Macfarlane
There was something uncanny in their stillness as the hare came to a halt, as if to pay its last respects. Not peace exactly, but a temporary truce. A space between violence and escape. Between instinct and outcome.
I don’t know if the hare sensed any danger had passed, or if it simply didn’t pause to question it. But for those few seconds, I saw a kind of quiet understanding - an unscripted moment between wild things, each absorbed in its own purpose.
Nature doesn’t dramatise. It simply is. And in that simplicity, we sometimes find stories layered in silence - strange, fleeting truths that ask only to be witnessed.
This was one of those moments that stays with you - not because it was dramatic, but because it felt like a privilege to witness something so unusual, so quietly powerful, and so easy to miss.
P.S For any North American readers, this is a European Common Buzzard which looks nothing like your buzzard. I had an extended ‘argument’ with a North American chap when I originally posted the first image on Facebook as he wouldn’t take it from me that I was correct in calling the bird a buzzard. We got there eventually, lol.
This post first appeared on my Substack, My Journey With a Camera, on 2 June 2025