The flycatcher and the fly – an eternal dance on the wing

Wenlock Edge In that moment, bird and fly are immune to the forces of gravity and exist in a time and space around which everything else spins

The spotted flycatcher pauses to consider approaching figures for a second before looping through the air between fence posts. The bird pauses mid-flight to snip an insect also in flight. In that moment, bird and fly are immune to the forces of gravity and exist in a time and space around which everything else spins. Like TS Eliot's "still point of the turning world" (Burnt Norton), the spotted flycatcher is a blur of brown light: a smudge of wings, striated breast, pencil-point beak and eye shiny beetle black - stilled. The bird is poised, as is the gnat it plucks, dancing in a sunbeam between trees and the open field.

Both creatures were anonymous flecks in the stuff of landscape lush with summer rain, setting seed, warming clammily in a July afternoon, until now. This one moment when bird snatches insect - an act repeated by this and millions of other birds, and a fate that befalls a zillion flies - feels auspicious as the magnitude of it escapes into the surrounding world.