IN PROGRESS

On a glorious, warm morning in July nearly three years ago, shortly after 5.00, I was walking towards the hospital Vivantes am Urban for a bilateral mastectomy (after having been diagnosed with breast cancer when a total of three malignant tumours had been found the month before), when a fox suddenly appeared right in front of me. (I had probably been too busy practising long, deep, anti-panic breathing to see him coming).

We both froze and stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed like minutes, but was more likely seconds.

I remember thinking that had I believed in omens, I would be wondering whether this was a bad or a good one. (As it turned out, I could not have wished for a better outcome of an inevitable surgery).

I often thought about the moment in the time afterwards, marvelling at Berlin’s inner-city wildlife. I also decided that if I got back into photography mode, I would seek more such encounters and try to document them.

Since then, I have been photographing wildlife, mostly birds, in more natural settings and in cemeteries, but not in the streets, until one early morning recently I startled, and was startled by, two kestrels in E.T.A. Hoffmann Promenade, a small alley leading from Lindenstraße, opposite Jewish Museum, to Friedrichstraße just north of Mehringplatz.

I was out looking for photographs for something entirely different for a photography course assignment, so my camera was locked and loaded, though not for bird photography, and I managed this bad photo of one of them: