Editor’s note: Pacific NW magazine’s weekly Backstory provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the writer’s process or an extra tidbit that accompanies our cover story. This week’s cover story explores tensions over red foxes and photographers’ access to them on San Juan Island.

FIVE YEARS AGO, Kevin Ebi was living a nature photographer’s wildest dream. Panning with a camera and long lens trained on a young red fox with a European rabbit in its mouth, he was stricken by unreal happenstance.

Ebi heard an avian call from behind and, because he’d just produced a book about bald eagles, knew what was coming next.

The Lynnwood-based photographer kept his shutter depressed and captured an extraordinary midair drama — an eagle flying off with a rabbit that was being gripped tenaciously by the young fox, or kit. Ebi calls the photo “flying fox.” It was published and broadcast globally, cited in a prestigious photo contest and included in a 2018 year in pictures gallery by CNN.

That photo and a viral video of the encounter, captured by Zachary Hartje, another Seattle-area photographer, touched off what amounts to a rush on the scene of the “flying fox” sequence — San Juan Island National Historical Park.

In a way, “flying fox” sparked discord over photographer access to newly born fox kits in a rural community where the term “fox photographer” has devolved into a slur.

“I haven’t photographed the foxes this year and, in all likelihood, I never will again. The situation leaves me conflicted,” Ebi says of the developments on San Juan Island.

Ebi could not have conceived of the hubbub he might have at least indirectly inspired. In fact, when he posted the image, he thought it “might generate some minor interest.” After all, Ebi figured he’d already experienced the break of his professional photography career: His photo of a rainbow at Haleakala National Park was chosen to grace a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016.

By the time he captured the eagle-and-fox photo, Ebi already knew his image of Northern Lights dancing over part of the Cascade Range would be included in another release of Forever stamps later that year. Yet the stamp images generated mere puffs of smoke compared to the media firestorm ignited by “flying fox.”

Ebi says it saddens him that the site of one of his biggest career achievements has been gripped by conflict. “No one wins,” he laments.

Glenn Nelson , a former Seattle Times reporter, founded The Trail Posse (trailposse.com) and is community director at Birds Connect Seattle (birdsconnectsea.org), formerly Seattle Audubon.