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.
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.
I am always insanely envious of photography the like of which you have captured here Lynn; those almost absurd and unbelievable moments that happen in nature! You were blessed!
That’s the thing about photography isn’t it, noticing a moment many would just pass by, being curious, and telling the story. I felt as though I was there with you in your wondering:)