There is a wood near Hertford that I had only just begun to know.
Nothing about it announces itself. It is the kind of place people walk their dogs through without looking up. That is exactly why I go to woods like it. I have spent years drawn to the places nobody else stops for.
I was out that morning with a camera and no plan, trying to learn the ground. Up to that point I had found nothing worth photographing, and it did not trouble me. Learning a place is mostly walking, and most of the walking gives you nothing you can keep.
Then I came round a bend in the path.
There was a holly bush on the corner, or some other low scrub, enough to hide whatever was on the far side of it. I did not hear a thing. The fox was simply there, no more than five metres ahead of me, and I was stopped in my tracks.
We looked at each other, and neither of us moved.
It was a healthy-looking animal. The coat clean, almost gleaming, a deep orange and ginger, with white behind the nose, under the chin and down the chest. The tail big, dark and bushy. The ears were pricked and alert, and its eyes, bright and orange, were fixed on mine.
I knew, in the way you know something without having to reason it, that if I reached for the camera the fox would be gone. A hand rising to a long lens looks like a threat, and a fox has every reason to read it as one. Foxes do not trust people after years of being hunted, and this one had no way of knowing that not all humans want to hunt them.
So I stayed still. It stayed still. For a few long seconds we held each other's gaze. Then it turned its head, unhurried, and walked off into the bracken.
What I felt in those seconds was a mix of calmness, excitement and joy, all at once, none of them cancelling the others out.
And when it had gone, I did not feel I had missed anything. I had made no photograph, and there was nothing to regret. The fox's lasting gaze is imprinted in my memory more surely than any file on a card.
Reaching for the camera would not have won me an image. It would only have ended the thing that was actually happening. Keeping the camera down was the one thing I could offer the fox in return for the encounter, a way of saying, without moving, that I was not a threat.
That meeting changed the rest of my morning.
I did not photograph a single tree after it. Something in the encounter had reset my attention and tuned it to the living rather than the standing. I found myself watching a deer out in the field at the edge of the wood, and made a couple of frames of it. Nothing worth sharing.
But I walked home with a renewed respect for the photographers who do this properly. The good wildlife images are almost never luck. They come from people who understand behaviour, who read an animal and wait, sometimes for years, for the moment to arrive.
What I had was not skill. It was presence, and the good fortune of being somewhere quietly enough that a fox walked into it.
A while later, in another wood I was also only beginning to learn, I met the opposite decision.
I heard them before I saw them. The dry, chipping sound of an adult working at a trunk is common in the woods I walk, so common that I barely register it now. Then came the other sound, the young going frantic as a parent arrived with food.
I say young, but they were nearly grown, close to fledging.
I moved carefully and put myself behind some scrub and a low, branching trunk. Far enough back, and hidden enough, that the birds could carry on as though I were not there.
Then I raised the 100-400. And here is the part that matters. I raised it, at first, only to get a closer look. Not to make a picture. To see.
The nest was a hole in the trunk of a hornbeam. For twenty minutes I watched noise come out of that hole and nothing else. Then one of them put its head out and called.
It was one of this year's young, a great spotted, I believe, though I am no expert on birds. Black and white, with a red cap over the crown, which as I understand it is how you tell the juveniles from their parents. It filled the mouth of the hole, looking out at a world it had not yet been into, calling and calling for a parent to come back.
It was beautiful in a way I had not planned for and could not sit still under. I fired off a few frames, keeping my distance, keeping hidden.
A parent swept back in to feed them, and the sound was extraordinary. Then it left again to gather more. A few minutes later one of the young reappeared at the hole and started its calling once more.
I stayed for the better part of an hour, and the hour did not feel long.
There is a particular pleasure in being let into something like that. Not the thrill of a rare sighting, but something quieter. Company, almost. An hour in the presence of a family going about its day, none of it performed for me, none of it aware of me at all.
In the end I made quite a few frames. Nothing special, again. Just a record of the encounter.
Two encounters, then, and two opposite choices. Camera down for the fox. Camera up, for the better part of an hour, for the woodpeckers.
But I had watched, first, long enough to be sure I was changing nothing. Only then did I let the camera come up.
For a long time I could not have told you what connected them, and I am wary of tidying it into a rule, because it was never a rule. It was one instinct answering two different situations.
Both times, the animal came before the photograph. That was the only question I was really asking, in the half-second I had to ask it. Would making the picture frighten this creature, or change what it was doing?
With the fox, the answer was plainly yes. So there was no picture to be had, and no sense in wanting one.
With the woodpeckers, I could take the time to find out, and the answer was no. So the camera was allowed.
The decision was never about the image. It was about the creature. The image was only ever permitted to exist if it cost the animal nothing.
I used to assume that being present meant putting the camera away. That the photograph and the moment were somehow in competition, and that the serious thing to do was to choose the moment.
The woodpeckers taught me otherwise. That hour behind the lens was as present as any I have spent in the woods. The camera was not between me and the birds. It was how I paid attention to them.
Presence is not always the camera lowered. Sometimes it is an hour spent raising it, carefully, for the right reasons.
I did not always move through the woods this way. For years I was not much interested in the animals at all, through nothing better than my own ignorance.
What changed me was a spell working alongside the Woodland Trust, learning not only about the trees but about everything the trees hold up. A single mature oak can support well over two thousand species.
Stand under one and let that land properly, and it stops being a tree. It becomes a kind of city, most of its life going on entirely without reference to you.
Once you have felt that, you walk through a wood differently. I still wear a bright coat so I can be seen. But I move through the place trying to disturb as little of it as I can.
Taking only photographs, leaving nothing but footprints. It is a worn phrase. I have not found a truer one.
My primary activity, if I am honest, is going for a walk. I just happen to take a camera and tripod along.
In a wood I am only starting to know, I seldom come home with anything final. I make a few scrapbook frames and go on a feeling, whether the place has something in it and whether I can see it yet. Some places say no for a long time. One I wrote off for years, until circumstances kept sending me back and it slowly began to give something up. Often it is only a hunch. Sometimes it is just dogged persistence.
But it is fine to go home without an image, because I went for the walk first and the photograph second. Coming back empty-handed has never felt like a failure. You go, you walk, you pay attention, and you take whatever the morning hands you, which is often nothing you would keep. That unhurried, expecting-nothing state is not the price you pay for the good encounters. It is the soil they grow in.
And this is the quiet thing underneath both encounters, the reason I treasure them rather than simply enjoying them.
They are not achievements. I did not go looking for the fox or the woodpeckers, and I could not have. They are what a wood gives to whoever keeps turning up in it, without a shot list, in ordinary places, on ordinary mornings, quietly enough and often enough to be there when something happens.
They are received, not pursued.
The same faithfulness that slowly teaches you a stand of trees is the faithfulness that puts you on the path when the fox rounds the bend. The encounters are not a different pursuit from the woodland work. They are what the woodland work makes possible.
I have a great many photographs of these woods, and I will make many more.
But the image I think about most from that first morning near Hertford is the one that does not exist. I can still see the fox exactly. The stillness in it. The moment it decided I was no threat and turned away.
I have no file of it, and I do not want one.
Some moments do not need to be photographed. They only need to be remembered.
